4: Hammer of Thor Chronicles: Mjolnir Savvy
by La Aardvark
Summary: In a remote asteroid ONI laboratory, Flint 093 wakes to find himself in environmental isolation. Months of torturous testing and experimentation to find a cure for his Flood infection leave him bitter and feeling abandoned. And then SHE appears...
1. Freezerburn

**1: FREEZERBURN**

The ONI symbol on the floor of the only shuttle bay looked worn out, in need of a new coat of paint. But the only man standing in the doorway to the laboratory beyond the bay did not look inclined to attend the matter in the least. Dressed in a white lab smock with large front pockets, black slacks poking out the bottom nearly disappearing under the brighter shade of the smock. Doctor Gary Tam was the head scientist at the asteroid lab, his group often working on scientific and medical mysteries. The lab was equipped with several isolation cells for just this circumstance; and was also embedded in an asteroid far from any planetary ecosystem also for the same.

Tam didn't look like a typical doctor, of any field, with a large, square jaw and blunt, angular features. His deep-set brown eyes seemed to see all and comment on nothing, but his hazel hair was kept in a standard military buzz cut, suggesting he'd either had an incident with hair at one point in the lab, or had been a soldier at some former point in his life. He also did not wear glasses, or carry a magnifying glass, or even keep a stethoscope around his neck.

Indeed, the only thing denoting him as a resident of the asteroid laboratory was the white smock. Above him, the iris airlock door had finished sealing shut, and the massive Longsword bomber had come to a final rest. Moisture in the air had begun to ice up across the frozen black hull, a strange color indeed for a standard Longsword bomber. Though typically a regulation gray, this Longsword looked odd in more ways than just its color. The variations were slight, proving only enough to be noticeable, and not enough to be obvious.

Tam waited patiently for the hatch to open, but when it did, he was mildly surprised to see what came walking down the ramp to meet him on the floor. The seven-foot-tall Spartan was clad fully in his Mjolnir armor, a green behemoth to reckon with. Coming to a stop in front of the doctor, the Spartan looked him over once before offering a loose salute.

Though not in the right branch of ONI to have deserved it, Tam found he appreciated the gesture. To prove that point, though, he threw an equally sloppy salute back. "Welcome to the lab. I heard you have something for us."

"I have a unique medical case that needs specialized attention." The Spartan corrected, his voice gruff and his tone correctional. Salutes or no, he was all business, and he evidently felt somewhat protective of the cargo he was about to give up. "Do you have containment suitable for Flood contamination here?"

Doctor Tam felt taken aback by the request, as nothing of the kind had been mentioned over the deep space comn that had told them to expect this Spartan in the first place. "Well… I… yes, I suppose we do. If the Flood in question is of benign nature. Nothing in here is especially bulletproof, mind you."

"That will do." The Spartan turned away, and headed back up into his bomber, so Tam followed him. He was led to a side area behind the cockpit, where a cryo-stasis pod that looked like it belonged in a frigate had been wired into the systems. The pod was active, but due to the odd conditions it was in, the glass front had iced over, leaving the occupant obscured.

"In that?" Tam asked, pointing at it.

The Spartan nodded, reaching up and running a gloved hand over the ice, slicking it away. Tam felt his eyes bug out of his head as he realized what lay within the pod; another Spartan! Even frozen, the nature of the second Spartan's condition was plainly evident. The Mjolnir armor looked to be coated in several large splotches of very nasty looking brown goop, pocked over with bullet scarring, and even cracked badly in several places. The visor was intact, however, leaving the identity of the afflicted unknown.

"Well… at least it is contained for the most part already." Tam decided. "I should be able to get this into containment without spreading anything." He nodded once. "What happened?"

He got a blank golden look. "Flood happened."

Tam met the look with one of mild indignance. "May I have a more detailed report of the circumstances leading to this one, please?"

"An infection form attached itself to his back, and had cut through his armor before I got it off of him. He's turned a sickly green. Beyond that… he's lost a lot of blood, and had some other injuries before the parasite got him."

Tam nodded as he listened to that, then crossed one arm over his chest and cupped his clean-shaven chin in his other hand. "I understand. Alright… does this pod have an independent power source? I would like to move him without thawing him out just yet."

"It does, but it's small. It should be sufficient to get him into whatever containment facility you might have, given the size of this asteroid." The Spartan told him. "I'll be back through here to check on him. I expect progress when I do."

Tam looked back up from the pod, at the Spartan standing guardian over his fallen sibling. They were a dying breed, but no less devoted, no less effective, and no less protective of their own. Tam nodded. He well knew the idea here was to figure out how to combat an active Flood infection, not to disassemble the infected. Not that he really wanted to disassemble someone as valuable as a Spartan. "Alright, start cutting him loose; I'll call up some of my staff and get him moved stat."

Satisfied with that, the Spartan nodded, and circled the pod to attend its power cables. Tam stepped out of the Longsword to use the comn bud in his ear, and once the call had been made, he stepped back inside. He watched as the one Spartan cut the other one loose of the ship, and when the pod sat independent at last, he stepped back.

Tam dropped his hands into his smock's pockets, studying the pod. "What's his number?"

"Zero-nine-three." The Spartan answered.

Tam nodded, once. "I'll look up his file, see what requirements he has."

The Spartan looked down at his sibling, resting a hand on the domed glass as gently as if he handled something fragile and precious. "They think he's dead."

Tam looked up. "They?"

"You." He didn't look up. "All of Humanity. Zero-nine-three is the only Spartan to survive public execution at the hands of the Covenant. They broadcast the event on every channel we were using at the time."

Tam whistled in awe. "That's… something. I'd forgotten which Spartan that was, but I did see the broadcast. It was terrible."

"He got back up, and back into the fight, in time to clear my path so I wouldn't be slowed down when it counted most." Finally, he looked up. "Zero-nine-three is the reason I was able to catch Truth. The reason Humanity still exists. Treat him kindly."

Eyes wide, Tam nodded.

"I am going back to ONI HQ. I need to check in, get my own name off the missing list. Once I am through orientation and debriefing, and can get loose, I'll be back. This will take a while. I understand that. But I do expect some progress. And I do expect him to look better off than he does now."

"I'll see to it personally." Tam promised. Behind him, three of the laboratory staff appeared, walking up the Longsword's ramp. They looked over the scene before them, each somewhat apprehensive of the tall, green-clad soldier standing over the cryo pod like he intended to fight them for possession of it.

But as they transferred it to the conveyance tray, and wheeled it away, the Spartan just stood there, watching it go, seeming sadly. Tam followed the pod out, but though he knew the Spartan was watching all of them, he didn't look back. Soon enough, he'd made it through the airlock that led from the bay to the rest of the lab, and the Longsword was out of sight.

Partway up the hall, they all heard the faint ping signaling the shuttle bay had just depressurized in preparation of opening again. The Spartan was leaving; best that he was, Tam mused, as they didn't need one super soldier being motherly and concerned over their shoulders while they tried to work on the other one. In fact, it was probably best if the occupant of the pod his staff was pushing didn't see any of his siblings at all for a long, long time…

At the end of the corridor, they turned left, heading down through the lab towards the containment cells, a collection of nine twin chambers, one windowed to the next, for study, access and observation. Over the many years the place had been in use, none of them had been used. Most projects handed down to the asteroid staff were usually shipped in by the cellular or molecular sample… not in live specimens.

As he watched them cycle the pod through the environmental airlock between the first twin chamber to install it in the sealed room beyond the glass wall, Tam hoped the Spartan he was about to thaw out wasn't so badly infected that he turned into a volatile and dangerous Flood combat form in there… if he did, he'd need to be put down, no two ways about it.

Not even ONI's best could revert a transfigured Flood form back to what it had been before. He crossed his arms as the staff locked the pod in place, and began to hook it back up to an exterior power source. While often capable of sustaining an occupant for several days – up to a week – on batteries, trying to thaw said occupant on just battery power was a risky ordeal. More often than not, the thawing process would suck the battery dry too quickly, and the occupant either came out badly freezer-burned, or died in the pod.

Finished, the staff members all came back through the airlock on the side, to stand next to Tam. "When do we thaw him out, Doctor?" One of the junior staff members asked.

"I want equipment installed in here to handle the results first." Tam decided. "Priority."

"Okay." Hardly anything was militaristic; as the staff members left, Tam wondered briefly if the Spartan hiding in cryo would feel out of place. A good many of ONI's scientific and medical staff were civilians, making sirs an uncommon occurrence. It was likely the man in the pod hadn't mingled with civilians since adolescence.

After the brief reiteration of his exploits, Tam felt reasonably assured that he hadn't even been back in Human space for more than a few months. Spartans weren't like Marines; they didn't have social lives, or 'folks back home'… all they had were each other.

A forest of over-sized, super-powered, augmented Humans who had spent their childhoods playing with fire, guns and HE. Something as benign as 'social' probably wasn't even a word to them. Tam eventually left, shaking his head at the enormity of the task laid in his hands. Nobody knew how to combat Flood with biology. The only way to control Flood infestation was with bullets and fire. Lots, and lots of fire. This time, neither were an appropriate response.

Tam oversaw the installation and setup of the equipment over the next three days, and once everything was in place – or everything he could think of out of hand, anyway – he decided to go ahead and thaw out the Spartan.

Much of the staff gathered to watch, even though most of them wouldn't be assigned the project. Tam looked back over them briefly, noting faces; standing in the back, he noted even the most reclusive of the staff had come out for this event. He frowned momentarily, wondering how the Spartan would react to realize he'd become something of a bug in a jar for the day. That sort of treatment would make anyone uncomfortable; that they would need to keep him in an environmentally isolated cell for the duration of his condition likely wouldn't go over well, either.

He didn't say anything, though. Most of the staff hadn't been off the asteroid in a long time, and seeing someone new was a novelty regardless of their condition or situation. That the new body happened to be a Spartan only put a shine on that preexisting novelty. As the lid of the pod lifted away, frosted air poured over the lip of the cradle, and pooled on the floor before disappearing. Tam crossed his arms, tapping his fingers on his biceps. Nothing was moving, in there.

The two people in environmental suits in the chamber with the pod didn't look up from it, nor did they signal to anyone else what was going on – or why nothing was happening. Finally, one of the suited scientists dropped his hands on his oxygen hood, and Tam ran out of patience. Pressing the comn switch to open communications between the rooms, he asked, "Well?"

The hands-off scientist turned around to see him, dropping his hands. "I guess the Spartan wasn't kidding when he said his pal here was pretty bad off. Johansen is getting the readings now."

"You mean he put this guy into cryo when he was already unconscious?" Tam asked. His question caused a few of the staff standing behind him to stir and mutter.

"It's a guess. Might be why he's in cryo to begin with." Behind him, Johansen looked up at last.

"Got the readings. George, hand me the contact lines for the data." He stuck a hand out, reaching across the open pod. George looked around, trying to determine which was which, before selecting a line and handing it across to Johansen. He, in turn, plugged it into a port on the pod, then looked up. "Alright, Tam, take it away."

On the other side of the glass, Tam turned to the nearest console, and flipped on the monitor. Data streamed across it for a moment as the two operating systems synced, then it asserted itself as open windows with readings on them. Pulling the chair out from under the desk under the console, Tam sat down in it, and played his fingers across the keys, bringing the displays up under a different format.

Eyes turned from the window to the console, everyone wanting just as much as Tam had been to know what the holdup was. As readings came up in graph form, Tam leaned back in the chair. "Wow."

"If that's off the guy in the pod, shouldn't he be awake?" A female staff member behind him asked.

Tam shook his head. "Not for a Spartan. Most of their systems are accelerated or heightened; these are normal only for a normal guy."

"Oh."

Tam frowned at the readings. His understanding of the Spartan Project was minimal – such as the tidbit he'd just mentioned. But while the readings looked low, he had no idea what would be ideal. Running a hand over his head, he wondered where to start. Blood pressure was minimal, heart rate was _slowing down_… neural activity, on the other hand, was through the roof. Spikes as sharp as knives slung in both directions off the chart, their points vanishing off the edges of the available graph.

"Looks like he's… dreaming himself to death." The woman piped up again.

"I doubt that mess is dreaming, Kaitlyn." Tam mentioned. "I don't know what he's doing. It could all be directly related to the infection."

That comment earned him a moment of silence, as the gathered scientists all shared a look. Finally, one of the pair inside the cell spoke up. "Whoa!"

Johansen jerked back from the pod, his eyes bugging out of his head in terror as he watched the Spartan jerk straight up from the pod, grab George by his head in one hand and smash the man's skull with the other.

Bright blood splattered the inside of his hood, obscuring the real damage and hiding his face. For a moment, things froze like that, as the Spartan in the pod seemed to take stock of his surroundings. Still holding George up, he looked around once, before pausing at Johansen. Slowly, he lowered the body to the floor, letting go of it.

"Jesus." Johansen whispered, his back pressed to the wall.

The Spartan seemed to sag, as both hands went to his helmet, though he'd need to unseal and detach it before it would come off. Not once did he make a single sound.

Staring through the glass at the sudden demise of his coworker, Tam felt his own brain might have flatlined; finally, he blinked, and glanced down at the readings. The EEG looked more normal, but everything else had just spiked, instead; although while the heartrate was impossibly high, and for it, had brought up blood pressure, that second number went right back to dropping steadily again.

"Bleeding." Tam whispered, more to himself than anyone else. "He's still bleeding, somewhere."

"He just killed George!" The woman behind him shrieked, breaking the numb silence at last and setting loose a landslide of noise. Tam grimaced, but when he looked up from the screens to fuss at the lot of them for it, instead he found himself looking back through the glass.

Most of the clamor died back on its own as they watched what he was watching; slowly, seeming painfully, the Spartan pulled himself out of the cryo pod. But when he tried to rest his weight on his own feet, he seemed to buckle, and collapsed instead. From his new place on the floor, he just sagged farther down, as if getting up had caused him to black out.

"Johansen… get George and get out of there." Tam said, feeling hoarse. "The rest of you, out. I need four volunteers, prep for surgery."

Hardly an hour had passed, and already things were going badly.


	2. Things Best Left

**2: THINGS BEST LEFT**

By the conclusion of the standard work day, the surgery looked to be a wrap; what the team had found looked bad, but their patient pulled through despite the doctor's outlook. Given a matched transfusion, he finally came to without killing someone, and remained lucid for longer than a few moments.

The broken armor had been sent down to a different section of the lab, where the samples of Flood goo would be cleaned off and examined more closely. In time, the armor itself might be attended, but priority was elsewhere for the time being. Blood drawn from the Spartan that had worn it proved nearly the same composition as the goo from the armor, but with some digging, the underlying Human DNA was recovered.

Remarkably, while there didn't appear to be any particular antibody present that was combating the spores, and there appeared to be a thick application of spore contamination, there also did not appear to be any cellular transformation or degradation going on; the contaminants, as it were, were just sitting there.

He remained independent of the Flood, and the Flood remained independent of him. But for as much as the scientific team assigned the project looked, there didn't appear to be any reason for why. Equally as strange, there existed a kind of bonding fusion between the two that kept simple blood cleaning from being the answer. It was almost as if the spores were still trying to take over, to turn the Spartan into a Flood form, but there was something lacking that would make that end possible.

The Spartan in question remained weak, and green, but in stable condition – which proved bad. He neither decayed nor recovered, although the surgery to stop the internal bleeding stopped him from dying.

He proved a quiet sort – much like the general population expected from a Spartan – but when prompted, he didn't have any qualms with answering. This, in turn, proved him a particularly pessimistic and sarcastic sort. While he didn't seem to have any problem with the scientists, it did make it hard to take good notes; telling whether he was serious or being grouchy tended to be a guessing game.

At the end of the first week, though, something else became evident; Tam noticed there was no record at all of the Spartan ever getting any sleep. He just sat there, staring at the scientists through the glass wall, watching them come and go. For a solid week. The next surprise appeared when, after giving him a sedative to amend that odd behavior, nothing changed.

It was as if someone had swapped the sedatives for sugar pills. But when Tam looked at the chemistry of the medication, it proved to be exactly what the label claimed; so he shrugged his confusion off and tried again with a bigger dose.

Again… nothing.

Tam scratched his head, met with some of his senior staff to discuss it, and finally, took a sample of blood to experiment with. None of the chemicals he had to offer would bond to the sample, suggesting why it had no effect on the Spartan. It was odd, though. Why would he be like that – immune to everything except pain, really – when none of the other Spartans on record were? It was decided that that characteristic was likely why the Flood infection wasn't killing him, but it was like the meeting between an unstoppable force and an immovable object.

The Flood spores were still going to try until Judgment Day came.

Still, this revelation left the staff at a loss. Due to this feature, there then remained precisely two ways to knock the guy out; oxygen deprivation and blood loss. Neither would keep him down for long, unless the end result was death. In that case, it would have been a pointless exercise. Still, the Spartan looked hollow and gaunt, and despite his massive frame and large muscles, thin.

His brother had told them he expected progress – explicitly mentioned that he should look better off than he did now. Unable to conjure any other way, Tam decided to go with the lesser of the two evils, and thinned the air in the Spartan's cell. That worked, to a degree, though he put up a tremendous fight to stay awake anyway.

Tam watched him as he slowly lost the battle, wondering why. He didn't tell stories, and he didn't say anything he didn't have to. Sometimes, he didn't even eat. Tam had blamed the infection for the loss in appetite, as it tended to fluctuate from one day to the next, but the utter and complete refusal to rest had to have stemmed from something else.

Surely Flood didn't go screaming running everywhere, during every single moment of their existence until something shot them dead, did they? According to the reports he'd gotten on the topic, soldiers in the field hadn't reported finding any Flood forms being asleep, but they were often found just standing around, idly, doing nothing. Nothing, until disturbed, at which point the frenzy to assimilate all non-Flood began.

But while he'd killed a man fresh out of the cryo pod, the Spartan behind the glass didn't try to do anything else. He let the few brave souls to enter the cell with him come and go as they would, watching only, paying attention but little else. It was as if he were mildly interested to know what they were doing, but otherwise bored with his environment.

Tam had considered giving the poor soul something to do – a book, perhaps – but whatever went in had to go through severe decontamination before it could come back out again, and something like a book would dissolve under that mess.

Finally, after the Spartan had been under for a few hours, Tam walked back into the observation room adjacent to the environmental cell, and looked at the monitors. His brows rose.

Looking through the glass, he never would have guessed it, but nearly everything on the readouts was hyper again. He touched the bud in his ear. "Grace, you awake?"

_"I am now, Doctor… what do you need?"_

"I don't know… a second opinion? It's happening again. Come to the observation room, please."

_"Alright, I'm on my way."_

Tam sat down, watching the lines on the graphs jumping wildly in excited frenzy, and wondered what it all meant. Right as Grace came in, everything hit the top. Tam leapt backwards from his chair as the Spartan in the next room came flying off the bed, a blur of motion.

Tam struck Grace bodily and the two of them crashed together to the floor, tangling for a moment before coming away from one another. "God above, Doctor!" Grace exclaimed, unhappily. She pushed him away roughly, and sat up. "What was that for?"

"Did you see that? Did you see it?" Tam babbled, scrambling back to his feet. He first looked at the monitors, then through the window. The Spartan sat on his heels on the floor, his head down. To any observing, he could have been as calm as he looked; but the monitors suggested otherwise.

Picking herself up, Grace scooped her glasses off the floor, and repositioned them on her face before looking at the monitors. The EEG was showing minimal ideal, but just about everything else looked like it was winding down from a major adrenalin spike. She turned her head to take in Tam. "What happened?"

"I don't know." He breathed, feeling his own heart pounding in his ears still. He looked back at her. "But I think he's awake now."

Grace sniffed at him, and jerked her smock down straight. "Alright… why don't we ask him how he's feeling?"

Tam gave it some thought, then took a seat at the monitors. "Yeah, yeah, okay. Go ahead, you do that then."

Grace cast him a disapproving look, but turned away and stepped up to the glass anyway. Reaching down, she flipped open the intercom, then tapped a fingernail on the window. When the Spartan looked up at her, she stepped back from it, though, shocked at what she saw in his silver-gray eyes.

He looked haunted.

The dark circles around them remained, despite the several hours of uninterrupted sleep. Grace cleared her throat, took a breath, and stepped back again. Bravely, she asked, "How do you feel?"

His answer could have meant anything; "Alive."

Grace turned her head, to look back at Tam. She ran a finger over an ear, tucking back a lock of auburn hair that had gotten loose from the bun the rest of it was tied into. "Doctor… I don't think he's doing any better."

Tam pressed his fingers into his eyes, rubbing them out. Blowing a sigh, he looked back at her. "What am I supposed to do about that? I'm trying. We all are."

"Maybe Tori…"

"No." Tam sat straighter, then, his tone firm. "Absolutely not."

"Tam, I'm serious. There's something science can't cure going on here." She reached back over, and flipped the comn off. Turning bodily to face Tam, she crossed her arms. "You know what I think?"

Tam cocked his head. Behind her, on the other side of the glass, he saw the Spartan rise to his feet. He seemed to get taller, broader, more menacing-looking as he stood up, dwarfing the petite scientist in front of him. Tam watched as he turned away without even looking at either of them, pacing to the back of the room, and dropping into the chair there.

"I bet it's combat shock." Grace continued, oblivious. "He's been through too much, and it's catching up to him. Even Spartans aren't impervious to trauma."

"We don't _know_ what he's been through."

Grace frowned at him. "I don't think that's really relevant, Tam… considering the bits we do know. Did you ever look up his profile?"

Tam shook his head. "I got caught up with the whole reason he's here in the first place."

"Maybe somebody should – give us a bit better insight into how to better help him."

Tam frowned back at her. "And what are going to do? Give him antidepressants? The man is immune to every medical chemical compound known!" He flung out his hands, half in indication of the Spartan, half in a helpless shrug. "I can't even give him sedatives. Or painkillers. Have you _seen_ the way he grits his teeth sometimes? I bet you as much as he's been handling in there would drop any one of us right off our feet."

Grace sighed, and rested a thumb against the bridge of her glasses, closing her eyes for a moment. "There has to be something."

"Exposing a fragile system to the mother of all diseases is not the answer, Grace." Tam told her, gentler. "Tori stays where Tori is. End of story."

Dropping her hand from her face, Grace just nodded. "Okay." Stepping away from the window, she began to walk past him. "I need to get some sack time, or I'm going to be useless in the morning."

"Maybe some of us could take a lesson or two from that Spartan." Tam grumbled, but he eventually stood up and left, too. It was late – a hell of a time to be waking up – and most of the asteroid laboratory's staff was used to working on the 'day' shift.

Grace walked down to the personal quarters and through to her own, disappearing inside before Tam had even made it as far as the first doorway. He walked past Grace's door, turning the events of earlier over in his mind. There was, unarguably, more going on in the isolation cell than just the Flood issue.

The more time the Spartan spent in that room, the more things became evident; that he was unwilling to sleep, that his anti-social behavior stretched deeper than just being a man of few words, and as time wore on, perhaps a little claustrophobia growing on the side.

Anyone could get stir crazy, though, after being locked in a cell for very long at all – especially someone granted as much free range as the Spartans had been. That night, Tam wasn't the only one thinking on the problems and mysteries.

Feeling more alone than exterior circumstances allowed, the Spartan sat by himself in the environmental cell, his dull gray eyes staring out at the far end of the room, where the window let him see into the empty, dark observation chamber hosting all the equipment. The silence was broken only by the sound of the air processors in the ceiling. Behind those eyes lay a thunderous, bloody war, raging in continuous procession without a victor on either side.

Without exterior stimulation to keep it at bay, all that remained was the memory of a thousand battles fought, the stark clarity of realism bringing each event back to life, replayed a thousand times before seceding to the next. He wouldn't tell the scientists about it, wouldn't tell the Spartan that had brought him here. Didn't want to admit it to himself, either. Admission of the truth of the moment would lead to the next logical line of progression; and no one wanted to admit they had lost their last grasp of sanity.

But the clarity… it was unnatural.


	3. Patient Zero

**3: PATIENT ZERO**

Early morning breakfast clamor filled the small messhall the asteroid laboratory harbored, as with every morning, the staff coming together for a fraction of the day to eat, finish waking up, and talk.

Almost as per usual, there were a dozen of the scientists gathered around the same table with Tam, their heads down over a collection of nano-data pads, stuffing in food in between theories and biological equations.

At the other end of the mess, Grace stepped in, looking around for a while before spying the person she had decided she wanted to talk to today. She waved at the other scientists who tried to call her to their table, going past them without sitting down. Lifting a coffee from the tray of a fellow too engrossed in his data-pad to notice, Grace moved on through the tables to the one in the far back corner, with just one occupant.

Her head bowed over a data-pad of her own, the tall, slender woman looked like the perfect show model; she had smooth, flawless chocolate skin, bright, almond-shaped brown eyes with just the slightest hinting of epicanthic folding, and silken black hair kept at jawlength. Her smock was draped like a dead animal skin over the back of her chair, though, rather than being on her shoulders, like with everyone else.

Right as Grace sat down, she spoke; "Tomas isn't going to be happy when he finds out you took his coffee, Grace."

Grace set the coffee down, smiling guiltily, and positioned herself in the chair before resting her elbows on the table. "He'll forgive me." That no-one had directly observed the theft was immaterial. The woman across from Grace had senses that nothing could fool.

When she looked up at last, she only did so partly, so the faint hinting at epicanthic folding over her eyes obscured fully half of her irises. This, too, never seemed to hinder her much. "Need something?"

Grace lifted the coffee, and tasted it, before answering. "Had a theory, Tori, wanted to run it by you."

Straightening the rest of the way, Tori proved taller than Grace even when seated. "Alright, let's hear it. What's the basis behind this theory, though?"

"You…" Grace seemed to pause for a moment, almost for dramatic effect, before offering, "… there's a certain anomaly in the data on our guest, you see."

"Me…" Tori echoed, accusingly. "Me what? What does this anomaly have to do with me?"

Grace grimaced through her smile, but she gave a laugh anyway. "Damn, you're sharp at this hour? I'll never get anything past you, will I?"

Tori smiled back.

"Alright, the truth is, the bloodwork came back with better than just Flood spores in it. They're not bonding to any of the cells." Grace explained. "While I was looking at that, it occurred to me that I'd seen something remotely similar once before."

Tori leaned back in her chair, half-slumping to do so. "Skipping to the part where this is relevant…"

"What if we could purify some of that?" Grace asked. "What if we could somehow reconstruct your immune system with this? We may never figure out why he is the way he is – or even how to make things any better for him. But this might help you."

Tori rolled her eyes. "Grace, we've tried a thousand things for that. I'm fine. I just take the imocellin and do what I've always done… lab work. I'm good at it, okay? Let it lie."

Grace leaned her shoulders forward. "But wouldn't you like to see something other than the inside of this asteroid for once in your life before you die? Of old age, I mean."

Tori sighed. "I do appreciate your dedication to that thought, Grace, I really do. But this is my home now. I belong here. I'm satisfied with that – why can't you be?"

Grace shrugged, straightening. "It was a theory." Looking down at her stolen coffee, she lifted it to her face to take another swig off the top when a man bent over her from behind and took it right out of her mouth.

When she looked up at him, he said, "Mine." And walked off with the coffee. Grace pouted at Tori, but all that earned her was an amused laugh.

"Told you."

"That's not an upset man if I ever saw one." Grace grumped.

"Maybe because he likes you." Tori shrugged. "Don't think I haven't noticed you sometimes go through the wrong quarter door at night."

Grace gave her a most scandalized look. "Tori!"

Tori laughed again. "Hey, don't look at me like that." She accused, scooping her short hair back and tying it into a one-inch-long ponytail.

"I thought you weren't supposed to notice things like that." Grace defended, her cheeks flushing as she poked her glasses upwards on her nose.

"Why wouldn't I?" Tori countered, deactivating her data-pad. "You know the only reason the hormonal balance was disrupted was for accelerated growth; and you know they had to remove the platinum insert for inflammatory issues."

Grace wrinkled her face. "Oh, don't go on about this and that inflammation or disease or whatever. I was there when they had to pull you out of septic shock that first time."

Tori grimaced in reply. "Not fun, not fun at all."

Grace folded her hands together on the table, apparently missing her stolen coffee more than she'd openly admit. "Tam says he doesn't want you in the isolation labs."

"I can agree with his inevitable line of reasoning." Tori nodded. "But I have to ask… what were you two talking about that it made him tell you that out loud, rather than just informing me about it and leaving it at that?"

Grace sighed. "He's a Spartan, too, Tori. Like you. I know it's been practically all your lives since you've seen one another, but… and I do realize he's got the mother of all bad bugs crawling all over him…"

Tori shook her head. "I don't even remember most of their faces, Grace."

"You grew up with them." Grace argued. "You were supposed to be one of them."

"I'd probably be dead now, if I had been." Tori said. "Most of them are dead now. Less than a handful left, and of those, maybe one or two are where we know about."

Grace nodded. "I still don't understand what they did wrong that it destroyed your immune system…"

Tori shrugged. "Honestly, me either. But I'm alive. And for the most part… I'm healthy. That's good enough for me. Why would I want to go and ruin that by trying to fit into something I'm no good at anyway?"

"Tori." Grace admonished. "The way I see it, you'd be the only one he could possibly relate to… despite your occupational differences."

Her arched eyebrows rose. "Relate to? Whoa, whoa… Grace…" Tori quickly put up her hands, palm-out "what exactly are you saying – that he needs a friend? I wouldn't know what to say to the guy!"

"So? Neither do I. Thing is, Tori… he's not talking. But you know what? George is dead because of that. He's got a billion things all swimming in that head of his, and he's not letting any of it out. Tam had to put him down with oxygen deprivation because he wouldn't sleep. When he came back, he sent every monitor in that room screaming at the top of its digital lungs."

Tori shook her head, refusing to comment.

"I don't know… maybe being beaten half to death, infected by Flood, and then locked in a tiny twelve by twelve cell isn't so bad." Grace shrugged. "I don't know, I've never done it. What I do know is, you'd be the only one who wouldn't die on principle when he loses it."

"Sure I would!" Tori argued. "He'd kill me just by _breathing_ on me!"

Grace sighed at her. "I'm not qualified to give a Spartan therapy."

"Me either." Tori shook her head, stubbornly. "Spartans run around in Mjolnir and shoot at aliens. I'm a scientist."

"That one in isolation isn't wearing any Mjolnir… nor is he shooting at anything. He needs help that science can't offer." Grace spread her hands. "Call me sentimental, but even if he was your average joe Marine, I'd still have a problem with this situation. Someone has to do something."

"So why me?" Tori pleaded.

Grace met her gaze. "Because he _is_ a Spartan… and nobody else can handle him but you." She stood up, then. "I need some coffee… see you later, Tori." She turned away, but before she walked away, she half-turned back and added, "Think about it, alright? Just think about it."

Tori watched her go, and when she'd taken her breakfast tray to another table and sat down there to eat it, Tori shook her head. Taking her data-pad, she stood up and left the messhall. She'd think about it, alright – there was no avoiding that part. It was just a function of being aware of every little detail of her environment, and able to process more than one line of thought at once.

She found her mind too full to spare a brainwave to her work that morning, though, as the new data offered by Grace had consumed more than she'd at first credited it to. The other Spartan had been locked in that environmental cell for a week, now. Just one week. She looked into the laboratory database for files on the case. The access proved locked, but it only took her ten minutes to crack through it all and get in anyway. From there, she reviewed it from her own workstation, even taking the time to review the video-files taken.

Watching him crush George's head like an overripe melon and then just sit there holding the body like he wasn't sure what it was he was holding made her wonder if Grace wasn't right. Watching the processes of experimentation looking for ways to put him down without outright killing him put that end of it into perspective. But the data recorded off the room from just the night before proved of the most interest.

She watched the events play out until things became still again, with the grizzled man piling into the chair in the back and staying there, seeming to stare through the glass like a caged lion, then shut it off.

Yes… there were pieces missing. Most definitely pieces missing.

But the part that she felt the most attached to was how, no matter how hard she thought, she couldn't seem to remember him. She knew he looked familiar, but that was where it ended. His numbers ran parallel with those tagged to the public broadcast that hit the airwaves seven years ago; but there was no way those two Spartans could be the same man, given that the one featured in the Covenant video broadcast had been killed. This one, sitting just three levels below her, was alive, but looked like he regretted that fact.

As if, given a chance, he'd change it.

Any fear of contamination would be easily alleviated by the completeness of the environmental seal around him; there wasn't a single atom going to get in or out that wasn't permitted to. She could go down, and have a closer look, without risking anything. Even if she associated nothing else… he had proven himself an interesting scientific anomaly just by being the first Human to prove immune to the Flood.

One or two had been passed up for undefined reasons, but until him… none that had been _infected_ had failed to turn into a genocidal zombie.


	4. Long Thought Lost

**4: LONG THOUGHT LOST**

He sat with his head down, his mouth pressed onto his knuckles, his eyes rolled up nearly back into his own head to look out at them through the glass. Being seated at the other side of the small room from the window changed nothing; Tam didn't doubt for a second that he could see every hair, every pore on the scientist's skin.

Spartans were like that. It was what they were made for. It didn't really matter what Tam did, even if he turned the lights out. The Spartan watching him would know just exactly what he was doing. Probably better than even Tam would.

While intimidated by the man, and certainly so by the project he presented with his present condition, Tam was equally as curious and dedicated to it; it was the first time anyone had ever had such an ideal situation to examine the age-old terror that was the Flood. And no one was in danger! Their live specimen posed no threat, or at least none thus far. As with all ups and downs, all pros and cons, Tam soon ran into the same age-old problem regarding that age-old terror…

He had no idea what to do with it.

The Spartan remained quite contaminated, perhaps even a little ill. While on the outside he appeared well enough, observation had proven otherwise. If he tried to eat more often than once a day, it would come back up… and while he wouldn't admit, he often looked as if he were cradling a headache. The level of greenness in his pale skin had dampened with the introduction of pigment, but only just. Tam guessed if he were to hide from the light again long enough to lose the pigment, he'd look just as green as he had when he'd arrived.

It was nothing shy of daunting. Tam wanted to help – wanted to cure the hapless soldier. He knew if he could conjure the method, his name would be immortalized. Schools would be named after him. Better, his story would pass the lips of a billion students as they all spoke in awe. It was more than any other scientific breakthrough could garner, especially in this day and age.

But as far as the individual went, Tam often wished there was a screen or door or something to close over that window. Having the Spartan stare holes into him while he worked was unnerving, at best, and often would derail his concentration. And the man never looked anywhere else.

There was a perfectly laudable scientific reason for what he was doing, Tam knew – motion attracts the eye. Not to mention the fact that the man had absolutely nothing at all to occupy his attention elsewhere. He was likely bored out of his poor skull, trapped in there.

Tam felt he was getting nowhere – and hoped and prayed he wasn't backsliding. The research into the backgrounds of each of the living compounds he found was tedious, and the papers written were often fraught with filler to make them seem longer and more detailed. It was frustrating, and fruitless. Thus far, Tam and his assigned three-man team had come up dry day after day. Even potentially productive leads had ultimately earned them nothing.

The Flood was a complex organism, indeed… but the closer they magnified the Spartan, it seemed he far exceeded that organism in every way. It was really no great wonder that the stalemate had occurred when the two had met. Tam didn't want to give up, though, certain that somewhere in the Spartan was the answer, the key to why he wasn't a mangled Flood-form, the reason behind his current state of health.

He felt certain that once he found out what was going on chemically between the spores and the Spartan's cellular structures, he would not only be able to clear the Spartan of infection, he would similarly be able to then immunize every other Human. That accomplishment would bolster morale above all else, as troops that knew without doubt that they would not be turned against their own directly after death was more valuable than gold.

More valuable than a Fleet-Admiral's stripes.

But nothing Tam could come up with seemed to get him anywhere. The vastness of potential for his current situation was boundless… but that fact didn't help. Nothing did. Tam felt it might consume him, if he didn't figure at least part of the mess out. The understanding of the basic organic genome was just too vague.

Reaching beyond their own kind was like groping at straws in the dark, and hoping he got a specific color. He wouldn't even know if he actually got it, because the lights were out. The sad truth was, they likely wouldn't be turned on for many hundreds more years.

Grace eventually cracked the mystery behind the Spartan's chemical defenses, but while she thought she might understand how it worked, she still didn't know how to break them. The breakthrough was hardly that – it didn't explain why the Flood wasn't behaving in a normal manner as observed in the field, and it didn't necessarily permit them to concoct a drug he would respond to.

The first week proved the best of days, as the longer the project dragged on, the worse their subject seemed to become. By the end of the second week, he'd gone from simply observing the scientists to studying them with a predatory look on his face. By the end of the first month, he'd attacked the one soul brave enough to go into the chamber with him for samples. Needless to say, after scrambling to escape that rage, the scientist refused even on threat of death to go back.

Tam began to wonder if it was wise to keep the Spartan anylonger, supposing the Flood had finally begun to win out simply for time's sake. His aggression levels had increased, and the times when Tam ordered his oxygen cut, he'd become physically violent until he couldn't stand up anymore. Thankfully, whatever compound the observation window was made of, it was sturdy enough to withstand the fists of an enraged augment.

On the last day of the first week of the second month, Tam felt at his wit's end. He was ready to give up, even willing to terminate the Spartan, more for his own sake than anyone else's. He'd lost his mind, it seemed, and there was nothing Tam or his staff could do to help his condition anyway.

Feeling defeated, he sat at the desk, his elbows on either side of the keyboard, his head in his hands. When the door opened, he didn't bother to look up, assuming it was one of the project team members. But rather than shuffling in and taking a seat at the customary workstations around the laboratory they'd set up, the newcomer just strode past him, to stop facing the observation window.

Beyond it, the isolated Spartan was draped across the supplied bed, sleeping off the last round of oxygen deprivation. It had become the only way to get fresh blood samples out of him, without risking life and limb to do it. He'd break machinery just as fast as skulls.

Finally, when nothing was said, Tam looked up. He rubbed out his tired eyes, then turned his head to see who it was. Realization struck as his eyebrows bounced upwards. "Tori."

Even with her back to him, Tori was hard to mistake. Standing a little over seven feet tall, she alone could have looked their guest in the eye without looking up. Her jaw length black hair hung loose today, free of its customary pony-knot. It always looked like a nub when tied, and the gods only knew how she got such a short pony to stay. She stood almost regulation-perfect, looking down through the glass at the collapsed Spartan on the other side. Her feet were shoulder-width apart, and her hands were clasped in the small of her back, with her head up and her shoulders set.

"What brings you down here?" Tam beckoned, after it became evident she wasn't going to respond to just the exclamation of her name.

"Thought I'd have a look." Came the toneless reply. She didn't turn.

Tam blew a sigh. "Look all you like." He spun his office chair and leaned his elbow on the desktop next to the keyboard. "I have a feeling he won't be around to be looked at for much longer."

That turned her head. Her dark eyes flickered past him, before she looked away again; but much like her object of scrutiny, there remained no doubt in Tam's mind she had made note of every single dust mote about his person. From the rumpled work smock, his mussed hair in need of a cut, and doubtless the shoelace he'd stepped on and pulled out just a few moments ago. He'd have to remember to tie it before he got up.

"I sent in a full report on the case last night." Tam admitted. "I don't know what to do. I've exhausted every resource, every idea… I'm tired of not getting anywhere."

"So you're shipping him out?" Tori asked, her tone sounding as if she expected to be corrected.

Tam hated that tone. On Tori, it always meant she was just giving him the benefit of the doubt, even under circumstances where he knew she knew better. "I don't think he's really going to move all that far, Tori."

She sighed, her shoulders moving with the motion. They didn't drop, though. "I don't recognize him." Her voice seemed smaller, more distant, as if she were digging through mountains of memory to find something long ago lost to time.

It took Tam a moment to remember what she meant by that – Tori had once been one of them, one of the Spartan program, a supersoldier in the making. It was only by grace of her ruined immune system that he'd gotten her instead, and thus access to her brilliant mind. He let his brows meet in sympathy. "It has been nearly three decades, Tori. I imagine he doesn't resemble himself from back then, either."

She shook her head. "I looked at the file, Tam, just like you did. I have no memory whatsoever of this one… of him. Even when we were children, small and unlike our adult selves even prior to battle scarring."

Tam sat forward. "Well, the data all checks out, he _is_ a Spartan."

She nodded. "I know. There were several that I didn't know. Didn't have a chance to see. To train beside. We were so many. I never guessed he'd be one of that number."

Tam sighed. "Tori, as much as I'm sure it was great fun to be a baby trooper, you're not a soldier anymore. You're a scientist, and you couldn't squeeze into armor and go shoot a gun anyway. You've nothing alike anymore. He's old and bitter and battle-scarred. Doubtless out of his mind with the horrors of war, least of all what landed him here today." He shrugged, raising a hand in gesture. "You never did any of that. You helped to break a billion scientific mysteries and solve a thousand viral plagues."

Tori sniffed. "Go to bed, Tam, before you start drawling out the periodic table of elements."

He laughed. "I'm not that kind of scientist." Leaning forward, he reached for his undone shoe.

Tori spread a hand and placed it on the glass. "Grace told me what happened the other day."

"I imagine Grace has been keeping you pretty nicely updated." Tam remarked. "That woman can't keep a secret to save her own skin. That and she talks to _you_ about _everything_, too."

"She's still concerned that his situation isn't helping his condition." Tori elaborated. "She thinks he's losing it because he's in isolation, not because of the infection."

"I have my doubts." Tam sighed, finished with the shoe. He sat up straight, then stood. "Just in the past week and a half, the spore level has tripled. Either it's condensing whenever we poke a vein, or he's gonna get a lot more green than he is now real soon."

Tori half-turned to look back at him. "You're likely not helping, by starving him for oxygen like you are."

"It's that or hit him in the head… and I daresay the brain can handle oxygen starvation much better than blunt impact." He spread his hands. "He won't let us anywhere near him anymore."

Tori looked away, back through the glass. Through it, Tam saw the Spartan stir. He let his broad shoulders sag for a moment, feeling the event only amplified his defeat. There was no controlling him, no curing him, no helping him. It was only a matter of time until they were forced to put him down just to spare their own lives… and the integrity of their equipment.

Tori watched him turn and go, the last to leave for the evening. When she turned her head back around, she found her gaze was met; he hadn't risen from where he'd been sprawled, but his dull grey eyes were open, and they had focused on her face.

For the moment, he wore no expression.

Tori let her hand fall from the glass. She rested it on the comn switch, debating on if it would be worth the attempt. According to Grace, he never said anything anyway. Letting him hear her might or might not make a difference. She watched as he rolled his shoulders forward, as he sat up, and as he slid off the bed to his feet. He stood there for several seconds before walking calmly towards the glass. He stopped a pace and a half away, and tucked his hands behind his back.

Tori flipped the switch.

He stood silent for several seconds more before tasting his lips and offering, "Hello."

Tori cocked a brow at him. What made him decide to be civil suddenly?

The expression earned her an eerily cat-like smirk. "It's a greeting." He explained. "You say hello back."

Tori's face twisted, fighting not to laugh. "Hello." Might as well humor him.

"When did you arrive?"

He didn't move, he didn't shift, he didn't even seem to blink all that much. Tori wondered what drove him; he was odd to say the least. But even despite all she'd seen on record, and all she'd heard from Grace, bemoaning failure day after day, he seemed willing to defy it all. To prove he was still Human, still sane. "March thirty, twenty-five twenty-five." She answered, her voice just a hushed whisper of what it had been for the hello. It sounded hollow even to her. That date had been a grisly one, as dozens of the Spartans that had trained hard together and formed bonds of brotherhood were committed to the deep of space as little more than ash.

Others, lost in less gruesome manner, but twisted so horribly by the augmentation process that they were little better than herself – relegated to the back of the lines, where their sharpened minds could still be of use. That day she remembered. That day she would never forget.

Evidently, by the look on his face, her companion remembered it, too.

"You weren't there." He said, his own voice fallen to much the same as hers had; he remembered. There was no doubt. Every Spartan alive on that date would have remembered it. Remembered Mendez calling salute as the pods disappeared into space. As John had stopped Fhajad from being pushed in his wheelchair into the elevator.

No. Tori had not been there. Not for the ceremony. Like René, like Kirk, she had been mangled beyond repair. But unlike them, their bones so badly twisted they could survive only within neutral-buoyancy gel tanks, Tori's body had remained the shape it had started out. Only… without the one piece she needed most. Her immune system. Sadly, she shook her head. Perhaps it was why she didn't remember him. Had he been there? Thought she among those shot out into the stars, or perhaps lost to the intelligence barracks with Fhajad and those like him?

He let his hands fall from behind his back. "Why weren't you there?" He seemed to study her closer, unable to fathom what had crippled her so to make her miss that terrible ceremony, and yet still be standing before him today, seemingly whole and healthy.

"I was in septic shock." Tori admitted, feeling sour inside. "The augmentation process destroyed my immune system… and the contents of my own circulatory system turned to lethal poison inside of an hour." She watched as his brilliant blonde brows met. The lines in his grizzled face looked well-earned and hard-worn. "I couldn't even stand, I was so weak. I've been here, in environmental isolation, ever since that day."

He didn't reply, but the expression stayed.

"I don't remember you." Tori offered, wanting him to say something. Something, anything.

"Flint." He said, almost too low for the comn to pick it up. "Zero-nine-three."

Tori nodded. "I know who you are." She turned her head to the side, wishing there were deeper meaning behind those words. No, she didn't _know_ who he was… she just knew all the related data on him. "But I don't remember you."

His mouth opened, as if for a word, but none were spoken. Finally, his brows relaxed. "I remember you."

Guilt and elation mixed like an elixir of life with lethal side effects, and broiled in her stomach. It twisted, sending pain shooting across her abdomen and up into her ribs. Tori's expression withered for the agony, but she couldn't take her eyes off his face. "You remember me?"

He placed a finger on the glass, level with her throat. "…Tori. Am I right?"

She smiled at him, feeling tears begging at the edges of her eyes. How could he remember her, so battle-worn, so tormented, after everything he'd been through and experienced and seen, and she didn't remember him? It hardly seemed fair. And he didn't even have the advantage of having seen her files recently. Unable to wrest words out of her clenched guts, Tori answered him with a nod.

The cat-like smirk returned. This time, it crinkled his eyes. Somehow, they seemed more silvery, and less dull, for it. "I remember you."

Tori raised her hand from the switch, and touched the glass opposite his finger. "Are there others?" She begged, wondering if she weren't experiencing feeling for the first time in nearly twenty seven years. Being yanked away from what had become her family for the first part of her life and thrust into virtual isolation had been rough. Warming up to the staff had been hard, at the tender age of thirteen. She had been one year younger than the Team Lead… John 117.

Flint nodded, seeming to take it in stride. "A couple, here and there. We don't know where some of them are. Others… gone. I had just found one of the missing ones, when…" he raised his other hand, and looked at it, for indication. "… this happened." Following that, he looked back up at her, and shrugged. "Can't win them all, I guess."

Tori felt like collapsing, but she held her own. "It's been… going on twenty-seven years." She paused to inhale, allowing her gaze to drop from his face for a moment. Below it there really wasn't much to see, beyond the fabric of the garments afforded him. "Since I've seen another Spartan."

Tapping on the glass lifted her eyes, to see him giving her what amounted to an incredulous look. "Are you trying to make me feel old, Tori, or is that you trying to be sentimental?"

She cocked her head, feeling willing to banter with him if he was going to. "Can it be both, without punishment?"

"Punishment?" Flint drew his head back from her, his brows meeting again. "What do you mean?"

Tori laughed. "Spartans never die, so they tell me. Spartans don't get _old_, Flint."

"I retain the right to still be a Human, after the fact." Flint protested, letting the hand against the glass drop. Tori pulled hers away soon after, to avoid feeling awkward.

She spared a moment to studying him, wondering what had made him spitfire… it seemed a personality trait more than a passing mood. "How do you feel, Flint?"

He snorted. "Old." Following that, he turned away, moving back to the bed, and sitting down on it. He was facing her again, though, so she stayed where she was.

"Old." Tori echoed. "I'm forty seven."

He held up a pair of fingers. "Got two on you."

She shook her head. "Yours are hard-earned. Mine were for free." Crossing her arms for lack of anything better to do with them, Tori shifted her weight to the side. "I guess you've found one more of our old number, Flint, but… I must say… this one is rather useless for what most people presume Spartans are good for."

"Long thought lost." Flint told her, his voice soft. "Doesn't matter. You're alive. That's what counts."

Tori studied his face for a moment, but could find no indication he was making it up; maybe Grace hadn't been wrong. But he seemed to warm to her awful fast, for just having been a Spartan once. Were they truly that few and far between, out there? Shy of asking this one… there was really only one way to find out.


	5. No Scars

**5: NO SCARS**

Each finger was straight, ending in a neatly trimmed, perfectly formed fingernail. Her knuckles only stuck up whenever she curled them into a fist, leaving her hands flat when open. Tori turned the hand over, palm-up, and ran her eyes down the lines in the slightly lighter-toned skin of her palms.

The places where the muscles and skin on the inside of her hand folded during use were plenty, but there were no untoward marks, no scars, not even any particularly noticeable calluses. Having struck at nothing more difficult than keys on a computer board for the last three decades, she felt the appendage looked soft… almost frail.

She had been told before that she was pretty – a word hardly ever attributed to the working soldier. It was, she noted sourly, what she had been intended to become, had even started to train for, but had never managed to fully execute. Mendez and Halsey had selected her special for that – her, and some five or six hundred others. Several had been culled under the harsh training conditions, unable for some physical hurdle to manage to pull through. Others had been struck off the list during missions while they were all still young. Tori didn't recall all of their faces, but she did remember many of her own ops.

Striking insurrectionist bases with all the skill and performance of a trained soldier at the young, and annoyingly short, age of ten. The augmentations bumped them up, but within proportion; case in point, if Tori would have grown to adulthood normally, she would have done so slower, but she still would have been an eyebrow taller than Flint, if he too had not been augmented, for instance. Given that they all were, it put the lot of them above regular humans, but still within the same perimeters as before, with one another.

Which had landed her squarely one eyebrow taller than Flint.

More still of the Spartans had been culled during the augmentation processes… like herself. Hers wasn't necessarily a unique case, in that regard, but she still was the only one so afflicted who had been saved before her own internal system could kill her. She remembered spending many long nights lying awake inside an isolation chamber much like the one Flint now occupied, wondering what would ultimately become of her.

Being otherwise physically fit and just as mentally sharp had landed her here – an environmentally sealed asteroid laboratory, where little things like bugs, animals, and plants couldn't offer any contaminants that might irritate her physiological lack. The other humans had to be careful, as well – nobody came or went from the base without first informing Tori, who had to retreat behind the next airlock, then wait for the newly contaminated area to be purified and the humans in question to go through decontamination processes sufficient to permit them, and in turn, Tori, access to the lab at large.

"Want to borrow the clippers?"

The voice jolted Tori out of her reverie, startling her back into reality. She looked up, lowering her over-scrutinized hand back to the desk, and took in the intruder. Chris had soft, round features with small, tan eyes, and a shock of tawny hair that currently supported his safety glasses. He had a containment suit on, the bulky thing sagging off his narrow shoulders like a second skin that was by far too large for him.

He plucked at the fingers to the gloves as he stood there, looking back at her, his thick eyebrows up. Pausing the motion with his hands, he offered, "Startle you?"

"Derailed my train of thought… yes." Tori admitted. She did have a nasty tendency to focus too deeply sometimes, though usually the active swirl of motion around her by the other scientists kept her from sinking too far. Having been alone at her computer for almost fifteen minutes, though, Tori's mind had begun to wander.

He grinned. "Don't want the clippers, then?" Chris asked, jibing.

"Oh… no, no thank you." Tori offered a brief smile, aware that regardless which of them it was, it always seemed like a major accomplishment to them whenever she was caught off her guard. Doubtless Chris would be crowing about it for a few weeks. "I'm fine."

Chris nodded, stepping on past. "Well, what was the thought that it had you staring at your own hand so intently you didn't hear me come in?"

"What's with the suit?" Tori countered.

"I was in the cold room. Tam wanted to cross-analyze something with one of our older samples in the deep freeze, so I went looking to see if I could find it. I did, but it was… quite buried. I think we need a bigger cold room." Chris answered, pulling the closure down the back and letting the whole suit slump off of him, falling forward. Stepping out of it, he picked it up and hung it proper like in a locker designed for the things.

Tori half-turned to watch, allowing her computer to fall to standby for the prolonged period of inactive neglect.

Closing the clear paneled door, Chris turned back around to face her again. "So, what's with the hand, Tori?"

She sighed at him. "Doing a little prompted reminiscing, if you must know." She held both of them out to him. "What do you see?"

Chris's brows met, the outer edges rising slightly in indication of confusion, but his gaze dropped to her offered palms. "Uh… your hands?"

"That's all?" Tori asked, cocking her head.

Chris's brow wrinkled even deeper, well aware she'd asked him a trick question and he'd flunked it with his simplistic answer. He stepped closer, committing her upturned hands to closer scrutiny. "Hmm."

Tori sat for a moment, then took a sideways look at the situation and a grin split her face suddenly – if anyone came in and caught them like they were, it would likely be the talk of the lab for months. Never mind the utter ridiculousness of their respective positions – Tori offering open hands and Chris bent over them studying them as if he wished he had some form of magnification to help. Half a heartbeat later, she couldn't hold it in anylonger, and she giggled.

Chris looked up at her face, finally, a half-smile tentatively working across his mouth. "Am I being hoodwinked?"

Tori laughed. "No. I just feel really silly doing this."

He straightened. "Then why are you? What am I supposed to find, anyway? You cut yourself on your compad?"

Tori let her hands fall to her lap, still grinning. "Not at all. But that's rather the point. I was trying to remember the last time I handled something dangerous, see."

"Dangerous as in… paper… or dangerous as in… guns?" Chris asked.

Tori shrugged. "I don't know. Either. I do remember that someone taught us how to cut throats with paper…" Her brow wrinkled slightly, then. "But I'm a little fuzzy on the action at present."

"I'm so glad we don't have fiber byproducts around, then." Chris intoned, his expression perplexed and confused. He moved up back past her, as if he might head out again. "Well, I have to get that extracted sample can up to Tam's office, before it melts out. You try not to… come up with anything else weird while I'm away."

Tori nodded, only, watching him go until he was out of sight. When he was gone, she stood up, and strode across the room to the door to look out. Up the long corridor she could see his retreating back disappearing into a cross hall, likely that which would lead him back to the cold room, where he could claim the sample he'd likely left in the airlock that kept the room cold and the hall warm.

She shook her head at the man's manner, and turned the other way to head out along the preliminary loop that ran along the outside of the asteroid's girth. At the far end, roughly halfway down the length of the corridor's full span, she caught the lift up to the isolation wing. Getting through the door was accomplished with a swipe of the ID card she carried; it was often a forgotten item, especially for the other staff, but if a contaminant had entered the asteroid – namely, a visitor – then she'd be locked out for bio-hazard reasons. This generally meant she stayed locked out, unless she swiped the card, and if such a contaminant happened to be present, she would be notified promptly after the door refused to budge.

At present, though, all the contaminants the asteroid harbored were locked away behind sealed pressure panes, the lone live specimen living off his own personal oxygen supply. Tori swung the card back and forth at the end of the lanyard it was attached to as she walked, making good time but not outright striding as yet. Thoughts about her duties and her situation always inevitably led back to something Grace would say to her over the mess about the other Spartan.

And despite the moment of civility he'd expressed at her visit, the old problems had resurfaced seemingly the instant she'd left the room. He was starting to smash at the observation window whenever Tam had his oxygen cut out, but so far had not managed to break or even crack it. It was, after all, metal. Transparent, but still metal nonetheless.

Tori made it through the wing to the lone occupied cell, and stepped up as the door auto-retracted. Beyond she could see the churning calculations still running through one of the active monitors, the computer's active thinking keeping the monitor awake. All the others, while their lights shone signs of life, were dark. She well imagined if she nudged one or two, their screens would appear, and the progress on the work would pop into view. Tempted, Tori stepped up to one, and sat down in the abandoned roller chair, her hands poised over the keys as she studied the blank screen.

After the moment of hesitation passed, she stroked a key, and the screen flashed to life with windows showing diagrams, projected results and simulated events calculated in the past run similar with the data of what had actually happened.

Most of it was very deep genetic and biological, and at a glance looked cryptic. But given closer scrutiny, it all made perfect sense… the problem with all of it was that all of it was a series of unfortunate questions, a sequence of problem after problem, fraught with delays and setbacks.

The basic premise behind both creatures locked in that cell beyond the window lay split open on the screen, rendered in color code, sometimes in images, other times in graphs. Some of it was actual text, written out like a set of notes on something extraordinarily complex.

Tori ran over all of it once, and sighed. The science team had complained aloud in the mess that they were hitting their heads on a dangerous brick wall. Casting a glance through the window, Tori didn't doubt that assessment a moment. None of the data archived or gleaned from the present condition seemed really useful.

If there existed a cure, or at least some form of treatment, for Flood infection, it was likely as unique and complex as the Flood itself. Tori squinted for a moment, aware the room beyond the pane was darkened but beginning to think the rumpled condition of the top of the bed did not, after all, mean it was an occupied location.

In fact, if indeed Flint was lying there, it meant he'd somehow sluiced in half at the waist at some point after climbing aboard the thing. That or it was just wrinkled sheets, and he wasn't on it at all. Tori hoped it was the latter.

She stood up, leaving the terminal and its lonely glow to step towards the window, peering in. The controls for the room were all tied pretty exclusively into Tam's terminal, but the activation switch for the comn remained stationary on the sill of the window itself. Evidently, the lack of anything to really say to each other had relegated the switch to 'unnecessary function' status.

Unable to see the room's lone occupant at all, even standing with her knees pressed against the waist-high wall under the window, Tori reached down and flipped the switch over. Apparently, the mics coming online produced some kind of snap or crackle at his end, because before she could even inhale to offer a vocal sound, she saw him stand up from behind the bed.

He peered at her from there for a moment, evidently having been sitting on the floor where the staff couldn't see him, then rolled his shoulders back and crossed his arms.

"Want something?" He asked.

Tori shook her head, letting her hand fall from the switch. Even in the dark, he looked greenish. It was a terrible color on a human, especially given that the shade and the manner in which it had been applied all made him look like he were about to die a horrible, grisly death. And maybe sprout something that grew leaves afterwards.

Her silent reply earned her a cocked eyebrow. "I do."

The blunt admission got her attention. A billion possible things ran through her mind as to what he might be referring to, but she left all of them inside, sufficing only to ask instead. Guessing him to death would likely not produce anything of interest. "What do you want?"

His answer sounded almost rehearsed; "A weapon."

Tori's mind flash-vaporized about a billion more possibilities for that answer's meaning, then shook her head, feeling hopeless. "Why?"

"I'm either going to shoot my way out of this rock, or someone else is going to have to shoot me. But I'm not willing to stay in this prison anymore."

Tori cast him an imploring look. She could sympathize with the sentiment – she'd been in there, once, too. The only standing difference was that at the time, there hadn't been any demons in there with her. "They really are trying." Tori assured him. "The Flood is… complicated."

"I'm aware of that." Flint told her. He didn't sound angry, but he clearly wasn't pleased, either. "I don't really care."

"You're sick." Tori said. "You can't leave. You could die."

"At this point, I don't care about that part, either."

Tori set a finger on the button next to the comn switch, and depressed it. When the lights came on, it made Flint grimace for a moment, as his much paler eyes let in more light than her brown ones did. It was as much an assault on his senses as anything Tam's staff had come up with, though to a lesser extent. After his eyes had adjusted to the new luminescence, he looked at her again. Under the light, he looked a lot less green than he had while in shadow, but that was mainly because of the nature of the greenness.

"What are you doing here, Tori?" he asked. "Why do you care?"

Tori dropped her gaze to his folded arms, committing their lines to some study. The sleeves of the shirt afforded him went all the way to his wrists, but there were ugly marks across the backs of both broad hands that disappeared under the cuffs. There were even ones on his neck that vanished under the collar. Remarkably, all he wore on his face were a few small nicks that didn't even really stand out all that much. Except for the little one that hooked down the side of his temple over his left ear… that one had, in tradition of really deep scars everywhere, turned the same color as his blood.

Green.

Tori looked back at his silver-gray eyes, noting her mute study had earned her a cocked eyebrow.

"I know you've a voice." He told her, sounding halfway amused. "Mind using it?"

Tori gave him a sad smile. "What am I supposed to say?" She spread her hands. "You've made up your mind."

"Have I?" Flint countered. "When did that happen?"

"When you made your request." Tori informed him. "You either want to go back to killing people, or go and get your own self killed. You can't help yourself – you're a soldier and nothing more."

The other brow rose to meet the first. "Well."

Tori crossed her arms, too. "We are trying to _help_ you, and you don't even care."

"I've had help." Flint said. "I've even been kicked in the ass by some of it. I've been handed things for free, and I've left some of it behind. But this doesn't quite qualify for any of the above." He pulled a hand loose and waved it at her. "You being on the other side of that window is testament to that much."

"What do you mean?" Tori asked, probing.

Flint refolded his loose arm, all without moving his other. "This is more of a prison than the cell they kept me in before they strung me up for the galaxy to see." He shook his head. "They, at least, were under no delusions about where I stood."

"They… you mean the Covenant."

"Before the Schism, yes." Flint said. "You might recall that particular piece of my history – it was, so I'm told, on every channel the Covenant could hack."

Tori nodded. "We saw it… everyone did. Everyone in communications with anything or anyone else at the time saw it. Even the civilians. It made Command angry."

"Maybe you can understand the similarities I'm seeing, here." Flint said. "Maybe you can't. I well imagine they kept you in something small and sealed for a while, too, given your… condition… but I never had that problem. The last time I got trapped like this, the next thing that happened was they took me out and killed me."

"You're still alive." Tori argued. It sounded weak, though, and she wasn't sure why. But she had pressed the argument more for the sake of finding out why he wasn't still dead now more than because she wanted to calm his turning, subsurface fury.

"Call it an accident." Flint said. Not once in the whole conversation had his expression ever changed – nor had his tone. It was more chilling than any display of anger ever could be. It reinforced her mental image of him, being the soldier and nothing more.

"Accident." Tori echoed. The more she spoke, it felt like she had a limited supply of volume, and less and less was afforded to each sentence. If she kept talking, soon she'd be mouthing silent words. "Why?"

"I had friends in dark places." Flint said. "Friends the UNSC would have balked at. They got me out, pulled me back from the edge, and got me going again. I was there when John chased Truth back to Earth."

"He tell you that's what he was doing?" Tori asked.

Flint shook his head. "We never got closer than twenty miles. Cortana hit me with a heads'-up, and I cleared out his route. That was all."

Tori watched him unfold his arms, though only partway. Now, rather than rolling his forearms around one another, he had his right arm under his left, his hands around his sides. It looked like a contemplative posture – odd, if the conversation was anything like what her end sounded like. "Flint, I have to say… I'm not really convinced."

That same brow arched again. "Of what?"

Tori shook her head. "You."

Flint stood silent for a small eternity, apparently waiting for elaboration on that, but she was done answering. Finally, he piped up. "Which part?"

"All of it." Tori answered, immediately. "You've a million sides and angles, and you show them one at a time. I know that's not all you have in there, but the more we talk the more you try to convince me that it is."

"Well, in my defense, social niceties wasn't really a strong suit of mine." Flint offered. "I tended to suffer things like medals, promotions… if there's something in particular you want, then say it. If not, you'll only get me all turned around."

Tori smiled, unable to keep the impish quality out of it. Admitting a weakness? How un-soldier-like! The expression on her face earned her another of those rare cat-like smirks from him, though.

"So how about you quit with the games and just tell me what's on your mind?"

"As a scientist…" Tori began, figuring some preliminary was in order before she blurted it, "… I tend to approach puzzles and curiosities with analysis and categorization. With you, however… even from a chemical standpoint… that's been difficult to do. Do you know why you're standing there, having this conversation with me?"

His brows rose. "Um… because I got overrun by Flood forms, and couldn't fight them off fast enough?"

"No, not that far back." Tori shook her head. "I mean, after that. You should be as close to a dead soul as they come. According to the chemistry behind the Flood's biological progression, even without a controlling pod embedded in your chest, you should still have gone down screaming and twisted."

Flint's gaze dropped as his brows met, considering that one.

"So the question translates not as, why you wound up here in this asteroid laboratory, Flint, but more why you're still cognizant, ambulatory, and in control."

He met her gaze again. "So why am I having this conversation with you, Tori?"

"You see?" Tori pointed out. "That's just it. I don't know."

Surprise momentarily flashed across his grizzled features. "Really." But his tone never changed. "All this whiz-bang equipment and you can't even figure out why I'm still Human-shaped?"

"Exactly. That's part of why you're still in there, still quite green behind the ears, and still sick at the edges. All because _you_ don't have the wherewithal to be a good little Flood host and conform. Or mutate, whichever you prefer." Tori inhaled softly, tasting her teeth for a moment. When he didn't immediately reply, she added, "What are you, really? What did you do that even the Flood couldn't take you down? Believe you me, if you've got an answer for that one, we could take it and run with it. Then you'll be cured and out of there and back on the field shooting things just like you want."

"I rather prefer not to be shooting at things, actually." Flint said, sounding contemplative. "Most things I shoot at tend to shoot back."

"Regardless." Tori snapped. "Don't stray from the topic."

"You know what you told me about me just a moment ago?"

"That I don't know anything?" Tori reiterated.

"Well… consider that from my end." Flint said. "I don't know, either. Maybe John got all our luck and I got all your immunities. Hell of a trade, but it's the only idea I have to offer. I will say that I never had any problem from disease – even mild allergies – or infection after the augmentations were overwith. Not once."

Tori nodded. "It's a ridiculous notion, but apparently one founded on facts." She sighed. "One thing we do know, though… and you deserve to know."

He grunted.

"You're slowly losing the fight, in there." Tori shook her head. "The Flood's parts-per-million is increasing. Even if you don't fully lose it and become a Flood-form without a controlling pod, you will eventually become so clogged up and so overwhelmed that your organs will simply shut down. Your blood pressure is going up, and it's getting thicker. Like syrup."

"Nice." Flint grumbled.

"If I were to cut you open, for instance, what would come out of your veins and arteries would not run, like it would on me. You'd ooze. Slowly."

His face wrinkled. "Yuck."

"More to the point… when it gets to a certain point, your heart won't be able to pump it anymore, and soon after that, your brain will shut down and you'll die. My guess is something similar to self-induced petrification will occur afterwards, leaving your muscle tissues stiff and hardened to the consistency of soft crete. You'll be a dead brick, basically."

His brows rose again. "Damn."

"Yes. Quite a biological anomaly, given that the Flood spores in your blood don't seem to understand that they aren't doing anything to you other than compressing you down." Tori shrugged. "And that, Flint… is just a matter of physics, not biology. You've too much stuff in there."

"So." Flint dropped his arms, and folded his hands behind his back. "Get me a knife."


	6. I'll Show You Mine

**6: I'LL SHOW YOU MINE**

Morning clicked on with the lights, sharp and bright and slightly on the painful side, but it hadn't woken him. Flint was sitting against the wall atop the bed, picking threads out of the bedsheets with his fingernails. Utter boredom had finally claimed his willingness to be entertained by watching Tam and his staff sitting idle at computer terminals and testing equipment, sometimes typing, sometimes just watching as readings came out.

He'd gotten enough of that to suppose he might actually understand the equipment's use and function… and maybe even the jargon appearing on the monitors. But the conversations after-hours with Tori had served to loosen some of the bristling anger at being caged for so long, and more often than not, he'd find if he could just make it through the day-hours, he'd have something to do with his time after Tam and the others had left.

Today, though, the lead scientist came in looking grumpy – he usually saved that expression for when he left in the evenings, so it was worth enough note to lift the Spartan's eyes from the assembly of long threads off the slowly unraveling sheet.

Tam walked in wearing a frown etched between his eyebrows, his square features holding the expression almost as well as his face. He first cast a look through the window, and what he saw didn't really ease his mood. The stupid Spartan was shredding his sheets, one thread at a time! He knew the fellow couldn't really be blamed, having been designed with a destructive nature in mind, added to the utter boredom he'd been suffering ever since being sealed away, but it didn't make Tam any happier.

He sat down at the console and looked over the readings, noting the data had not changed since the previous evening. He had just poised his hands over the keyboard in front of the glowing display when he heard an extra person come through the door.

Startled, Tam looked up. His eyebrows reached for his hairline one moment, and in the next he was out of his chair and stepping to intercept. "Tori! No, no, no… what are you doing here? Do you know what kind of contamination levels we're dealing with in here?"

She paused where she'd been stopped, just a few strides from the door. "Yes?"

Tam sighed, and held out his hands to the much taller scientist. "Look… once is a curiosity. Twice is a coincidence… and I don't believe in coincidences. I don't want you in here. The risk is too high. What if we lose containment on one of our drawn samples? Go back to your lab and stay out of this one."

Tori cast him a perturbed look. "Doctor Tam, I am well aware of the risks of just allowing you to breathe within a hundred miles of me. However. The odds of a sample breaking containment are beyond small. Precautions are in place, and I'm sure your task team is observing them. Are they not?"

"Don't argue with me, Tori." Tam argued, his expression growing flustered and his tone getting edgy. "You're not to be in here anymore. You might have good faith in the procedure of containment, but I don't. And I don't want to have to radio out to have you replaced because you did a fool thing and died horribly. Your medication isn't sufficient to save you from contamination – only to stabilize you under ideal conditions."

Tori sighed. "But I wanted to see."

"No, Tori. Not in person." Tam shook his head. "There are vid clips, and records of all the data, if you're really that itchy for the intel in here. Trust me, it's more frustrating than enlightening. Now go." He waved his hands at her. "Shoo."

Tori cast a look over his head, through the window, but Flint wasn't paying attention to them. With the intercom turned off, it was likely he couldn't hear their exchange, and would probably never realize she'd come in at all. She sighed, deflating. "Alright… I'll go away."

"Don't take it personally, Tori." Tam advised, his tone softer. "With your intelligence, I'd have you on this team in a heartbeat if you weren't such a fragile specimen yourself." He shook his head sadly as she turned away. "As it were… I can't risk losing that intelligence."

"Just let me know what HQ says when their reply comes through to that report you sent them, alright?" She said. A moment later, she was back out the door, heading up the corridor. After she'd cleared the minimum sensor distance, the door slid shut automatically behind her.

Tam breathed out, committing the door to some study before turning away. "Yeesh."

"They're both Spartans, doc." Vernon, one of the team members, said. "I bet those two could sit and joke about training in the good ol days for hours."

"I don't need jokes about training." Tam said, through his teeth. "I need to know why the Flood is behaving like this, why _he's_ behaving like this… all this biological mystery is eating me alive."

"Maybe she could get him to contribute?" Vernon offered, turning in his chair to look back at Tam.

Tam half-turned to look across the room at the man. "No." He hoped his tone made it final. "She's far too fragile and he's far too volatile. Even from a purely biological perspective. That man could kill _me_ by breathing on me! Tori is a valuable asset around here and we all are fortunate to have gotten her expertise. I'm _not_ going to risk that on the off chance that maybe he'd be willing to talk to her at all, and less on the idea that _maybe_ he knows what the hell is wrong with his internal system."

Vernon shrugged. "You're the boss."

"Remember that." Tam snapped, turning back to his work. "He's about as hard to manage physically as he is physiologically. I'm starting to reconsider my standing in this situation."

"If we can clear him for duty again, Tam, we can eliminate the Flood's real threat the galaxy over. It'd just be one more step to generalize the procedure. I wouldn't give up on him just cos he's a surly old bastard with too many scars in his hide." Vernon shrugged. "It would make me feel better, though, if I wasn't always having nightmares about him coming through that window after me."

"I'll second that one." Another team member added.

Tam sighed, feeling defeated even though he knew he was far from out of available routes to explore. "I… I can sympathize with the thought."

"Vern, gimme that run-up on the mitochondria again, will you?" The other to speak up added. A skinny man with a short mop of brown hair by the name of Hans, the third scientist on the team had been picked because of his eye for genetic coding. "Want to cross reference it with what I just got here, see if it'd yield any similarities."

"Sure." Vernon's fingers paddled across the keys under them, then he added, "Okay, you got it. I'm gonna spin up the mixer and see if I can get the _Flood_ to respond to this… I get the idea that unless we pump him full of acid, he'll be unbothered by whatever drug we try."

"That's going a bit far…" Tam muttered. "Not a lot more can be fitted into his over-pressured system as it is. Given much more, he might actually physically pop open and spew guts all over the inside of that room."

"I don't wanna see it happen." Vernon answered. "And I don't wanna see the end result afterwards, either."

"Me, either." Tam sympathized. "And I don't even know who I'll torment with the task of cleaning it out of there if it gets to that, either."

"Nobody make you that mad recently?" Hans offered, tentative of accidentally volunteering himself for the job somehow.

"Yeah, something to that effect." Tam shrugged, opening a side window and running his eyes down the list of notes he'd accumulated so far. Some of them, he could tell by the atrocious spelling, had happened late into a session, and without the presence of coffee. He sighed, spying one medical term that was so badly mangled – and by context, unidentifiable – that it could easily have been three or four different things. "I need to keep a coffee pot in here."

* * *

The glass was a polycarbonate transparent steel alloy. The seal it was set into was also a polycarbonate, a derivative of plascrete added to the putty-like hull sealant that would stop atmospheric leaks at the molecular level. It was what kept the chamber sealed off from the rest of the asteroid.

It was also armor plating much akin to that found on a standard suit of Mjolnir Mark VII.

He could break that.

Had pretty much made a career of it, actually. He imagined he was the roughest on his armor of all his fellow Spartans, for that matter. Even John hadn't gone through quite as many suits of the stuff as Flint had. He drew his fingers over the seal where the transparent metal met the opaque metal, his mind wandering over the many ways he'd smashed Mjolnir to utter pieces.

A square of light appearing at the far end of the room beyond the pane lifted his gaze and riveted his attention, though, as there was a silhouette of a body standing in the doorway, backlit by the lights in the hall.

By the shape, he supposed he already knew who it was, even as the door slid closed again, guising whether or not the person had come inside or not. Hearing the comn click on overhead, though, he felt reasonably assured. "Good evening, Flint." The same soft, fair voice as before carried with the faintest of hisses through the line to the speakers in the ceiling, telling him it was time to cast thought to other, less irate pathways.

He let a smirk cross his features. She hadn't turned the lights on at either side of the window, this time… was there a recorder on when and how many times that happened? "Good evening, Tori."

The shadow on the other side of the transparent steel seemed to waver – it was likely all she'd done was shift her weight to one foot, but the velvet darkness had that effect on everything. Her smile was evident in her voice for the next thing she said; "In a good mood tonight, are we? That's the first time you've greeted me with a good evening."

Flint shrugged. "Was thinking about armor plating, actually."

"Armor plating." She echoed. "Dr. Tam informed me today I'm officially not allowed to be in here."

His eyebrows rose. "You're here anyway."

"Yes, well. Call me a rebel, but I've no perimeters within which to agree with him." Again, her shape warped, suggesting a shrug. "Tam means well. He's a good doctor. But he's mainly socially inept and has no psychological appreciation."

Flint thought about that, the smirk from before revisiting his face. "I can agree with that, I suppose." He turned his hand around, and set the heel of that palm against the rim where the window met the wall, and leaned on that arm. As he did so, he rolled his other shoulder, contemplating how it would not have been able to really hold him in the same posture as the one he was using was. The memory of being speared through on a Longsword's docking leg flashed through his head, and he stepped back.

"Hey." Tori protested. "You alright, in there?"

"Yes." Flint answered, sounding as though he didn't really believe himself. "I'm fine."

He heard Tori snort. She didn't believe him, either. "So. You were telling me about that… sand… sang… something. The Elite."

Flint smiled. "Sangheili… it's what they call themselves."

"Right, that." Tori amended. "What got you into their midst, anyway? You've yet to tell me that part."

"I don't think I ever shall, Tori." Flint muttered. "There are many things you won't hear me say out loud."

"Like why some of the strangest things will make you flinch like you've been stabbed? Or grimace, like you're unwilling to admit what someone else just verified?" Tori asked. "I have noticed you tend to leave a lot out, Flint. Not that it's really any of my business, but it does make a body wonder."

"Does it?" He rubbed his hands together, more to feel the texture of his palms than for any other reason, but paused when it made him remember that he hadn't been out of the grit, grime, and blood for this long in many long years. Grime soon connected with the sight of a long-abandoned Covenant ground facility so disused it had accumulated an inch of dust on the floor. He worked his face into a grimace, unwilling to let that spiral complete… he already knew where it was going.

"You've some nasty secrets in there with you. I don't doubt that much." Tori's voice stayed smooth, soothing. Most importantly, unaccusing. "But have you ever wondered that maybe if you just let it out… it'd make it easier to handle?"

"Tori… all that does is reiterate the parts I'd rather forget." He dropped his hands to his sides, frowning into the dark as he shook thoughts of something small, frail, and lost to him out of his head. Maybe if he held something else – a gun, perhaps – it would alleviate the nagging presence of that ghost. Holding his hands up without anything in them always brought up the same failing rescue. "Makes it worse."

"Well… if you're sure. I don't recall anything nearly so rough that I'd be unwilling to talk about it, but then I did quit when all it was was Innies, and I was still pretty young, then." She shrank suddenly, but the sound of an office chair rolling across the floor explained why; she'd stooped to grab one, and pull it over. Once she had it where she wanted it, she sat down.

Figuring that was permission, Flint stepped back and dropped across the bed. If she noticed he'd sprawled rather than sat, with his legs hanging off the near side, she didn't comment.

"I was looking through some older files this morning." She began, as if a change of topic had been in order. "After some digging and a little pass-file hacking, I did find some data on the Flood."

But… it hadn't proved to be that much of a change. Flint grumbled to himself for a moment before answering. "What'd you find?" Even if he didn't humor her and ask, he knew she'd tell him anyway, but he didn't want to give her any ammunition for later by refusing to.

"Well… you've been here about two months, give or take. So that makes this data uploaded to the server broadcast some… days after you'd been dropped off. My guess is it came out of the guy who brought you here."

"When I see him, I'm gonna kill him." Flint huffed.

"What?" Tori asked, caught off guard. "Why?"

"I don't like being trapped in here, Tori, that's why. And it's his fault." Flint answered, plainly.

"But if he hadn't, you'd have died." Tori put in, gently. "You don't want to die, do you?"

"At first, no." He admitted. "But since then… I've given it some serious thought."

"Flint." She admonished. "Don't be like that. At any rate, this data compile should be of use to Tam's team. You could be out of there and cleared for duty again in another couple of weeks."

"Doubtful." Flint answered. "But okay. What relevance had the timescale, by the way?"

"Tam told me he said something about going in for a debrief. My guess is we got the data off of him; some days after he dropped you off, he landed at HQ." There was a brief pause, as if for thought, before she finished. "It takes a while to get back out to this place, see."

"Which… would be why there's no word out of ONI about that report Tam sent some weeks back?" Flint asked.

"Precisely why." Tori sounded like she was nodding. "It had that whole, 'I stole it from a Forerunner gadget' feel to it, too."

"I didn't ask." Flint said.

Tori made a strange noise. "What? You didn't ask? What's that supposed to mean?"

Flint chuckled. "If he still had Cortana with him."

There was a prolonged pause. Then, "oh."

Flint contemplated the fuzzy complexion of the ceiling he was looking at. It took a certain ratio of light-to-dark to make things appear that way, but with the soft glow of the inactive monitors that were still online, the place could not suffer absolute blackness. The level of light prevented anything from having edges, though, or color, or even depth. Most of what he could see consisted of fuzzy blobs, and the fuzz would crawl like a fleet of ants six inches deep. He smiled at it. "It's a good bet he did, though. He always was protective of her."

Tori's chair made a soft squeak. "Did you ever have an AI counterpart, Flint?"

"Um… no." The words were out before he remembered the retrieval op prior to learning where John 117 had gone off to. He screwed up his face at the timing of his brains, but left the answer standing; Thor did not _belong_ in the jack in his helmet, so if they found him there, oh well. He was supposed to go back to ONI hands anyway. And if she pointed out as much, he could always just tell her. Thor was not his AI counterpart… he was just an incomplete mission.

Oh well.

"Did you ever wish you had one?" Tori asked, apparently unaware of the condition of the armor he knew he'd come in with. He recalled having it on when he'd first come to, out of the cryo pod. That had been a rough awakening.

Flint shook his head. "Not really. I didn't do a lot of intel ops. Also never found myself in need of much tech support." That was mainly John's forte. He was the guy who hacked through the doors, and ran the length of a Covenant cruiser just for the hell of it. He was also the guy who lifted the entire Halo array database to stop it from firing off. And then he'd promptly used that stolen data – still entwined with the AI who had stolen it for him – to light off the one that had sliced the _Forward Unto Dawn_ in half and left him stranded on that Flood-infested world. Flint rolled the memories around in his head for a moment before feeling satisfied they weren't connected to anything agonizing.

"There are days when I admit I wish we had one in the systems here." Tori said. "It would make running algorithms so much easier."

"Poor thing would burn out." Flint decided. A new thought occurred to him, and he rolled it around for a moment before figuring, what the hell… couldn't hurt to ask. Failing would merely leave him as-was. "Tori…"

"Yes?"

"Could I possibly get you to bring me my helmet?"

She gave a half-laugh. "Aside that I'm not entirely sure where they put that raggedy thing, Flint… why on Earth would you want it?"

He sighed. "Never mind."


	7. Breach Of Containment

**7: BREACH OF CONTAINMENT**

The messhall looked empty.

Tori had not seen it look this way in a while, given the asteroid had a staff of nearly a hundred, and all the times she had ventured here in the past, some sort of meal time had been called. Others were always there. Others, like Grace. Like Tam. But today, she was early. Nearly two hours prior to the standard wake-up call, it was likely her alarm would chime into an empty quarter. But something had to be done… something. That perilous two-month mark had passed with the night before.

Stepping through the ranks of vacant tables and chairs to the resource tab, she slipped a fork and a knife out. Sparing a moment to look at the utensils, she breathed a sigh. Flint had asked for one of the latter; did he know more about his unique condition than he let on? She knew better than to outright ask him, though. He'd already professed openly that he knew about as much as she did.

That didn't really change the fact that he behaved more alien than he ought. There were times when she couldn't figure out if it was the Flood doing it to him, screwing up neural pathways, or if it was something he'd learned out in the field. Spending the majority of his time alone at the front lines might have made him strange, but there seemed a pattern to it.

Like it was a learned behavior… had he picked it up off his Elite friends? Without meeting one such warrior herself, though, there was no real way to know. Turning away from the dispenser, Tori left the room and headed down the corridor towards Quarantine. She knew the cage was killing him – he'd never stayed in one spot for this long in his whole life – even the training grounds of their adolescence were larger than that isolation chamber. Having spent almost as long in one herself when she was younger, Tori fully understood his feelings; but it didn't quicken the cure or a treatment, nor did it heal his strange condition so he might emerge without knocking the whole asteroid dead.

Getting into Quarantine proved the easy part. Lifting the access port off the wall, she tripped the wires together to make the doors open without entering a code. As such, the opening was not logged, and if Tam looked at the files, he wouldn't see her intrusion. Replacing the port to the wall and securing it, Tori slipped through and down the hall to the only occupied room. Through the window, she could see Flint sprawled across the bed, either still out of it from the day before's treatment, or sleeping, finally.

He'd never really slept well. Put down by Tam's harsh deprivation treatments, he'd stay out for a small while, but not for long. Trying to get any rest on his own, the increments of time were smaller still. Each time, the terrible nightmares would bring him awake, usually hyped on fear or adrenalin or both. He never said what they were, and wouldn't talk about why he even had them.

She strode past the ranks of computers, testing equipment and rows of old samples. Most of them had been utterly destroyed by the rigorous process the scientists were using, making them useless. Each was just one more way how not to get the job done, really. Tori paused at the airlock entrance, and wondered how to proceed. The tedious process of staving off the Flood's expansion was not really helping.

Every few days, Tam would have to knock Flint out, go in, hook him up to a catheter and leave it open until he'd nearly bled to death; and when the pressure was relieved, he'd replace the necessary amount with clean blood before disconnecting. The process had left Flint looking more than a little miserable… but like usual, he didn't outwardly complain until he decided he was more than sick of it. But there was little anyone could do about being trapped in an atmosphere too thin to make good use of… Flint couldn't stop them, couldn't even fight them.

That, most of all, had made him edgy. Getting through the locks had slowed Tori, so she only got through every other night. Listening to him talk, watching him stare through the transparent steel at her, even taking in his current physical situation, all made her cringe. Unlike her, he was trapped in there for a small eternity. He had nothing to do, nothing to put his mind to.

And while the progress on finding a way to cure him was slow to almost nonexistent, it was still happening. The attempts of the staff assigned the project had seemed to forget what it was they were working on, though… he'd failed to remain Human some time ago.

Tori inhaled once, and blew it all out as a sigh. If there was one thing most normal Humans didn't understand about the Spartans, it was the small but significant fact that they had been trained as a team. One giant team. Divided into working groups, yes, but it didn't matter if one Spartan wasn't in another's assigned squadron. Tori had been long removed from their ranks, but she still remembered what she was.

Watching Flint decay was almost more than she could bear.

Her fingers traced over the recessed buttons for a moment, before she tapped in the default code. The near door opened. Tori ran her eyes over the interior of the small airlock, assessing and calculating. It was only a six by six chamber, but then it was only meant for passing through, and not for keeping anything inside.

She stepped in, twisting the knife in her hand. She didn't look behind her as the door closed there, watching instead the doors ahead; the hiss of a seal taking met her ears, and a short time later, a rush of foul air slipped through the breaking seal ahead of her. Her expression crinkled in disgust – but she figured she already knew what the smell was.

That was Flood. For all his being treated like an animal, Flint was a relatively well-cared-for animal, leaving his only woe to be his containment and his illness. Either by itself was enough to fell any man.

After taking several small, calculated breaths to steady herself against the terrible smell, Tori stepped out of the airlock into the room behind the window. She looked around, once, then moved toward the bed. Drawing near, she began to roll the knife around in her hand, contemplating its feel. The shiny, smooth metal handle rolled easily against the skin of her palm, but it wasn't why she had come in.

"See, Flint?" Tori asked, her voice nearly a whisper. Lifting her other hand, she stroked those fingers across his forehead. She hesitated when what she felt was clammy and cool, but the touch made him move, reassuring her he hadn't died. Relaxing again, she smiled. "See, you don't hurt me."

Tori took a moment to take him in; round face, grizzled, sunken features, broad frame. As the lights in the room beyond clicked on with the automated day/night timer, the light poured through the steel window across Tori and Flint, illuminating her presence where she ought not be. Tam had locked the door to Quarantine for a reason.

Leaning close over him, Tori's smile broadened. "You're not alone, Flint." Though his skin looked frightfully green, she noted, his hair remained the color of polished gold; it made an interesting contrast. Absently she wondered if it was straight or curly… he always kept it buzzed, so it was impossible to tell.

Not that hair of any real length had any place on a working soldier… it got in the way of helmets, especially ones with environmental seals. Straightening, Tori breathed out.

"I guess I should go, then. Tam will be along soon."

* * *

Hans made it in first, though Vernon was right on his heels. The two men hardly bothered to look through the window before plopping down at their consoles; both had had working projects the night before, and wanted to finish the relative theories before attempting anything new.

Tam stepped in almost a full minute later, though, coffee still in hand, and spared a moment to look through the window. He looked at the window itself for a moment, trying mentally not to call it glass, then through it. A brow raised.

Behind the transparent steel pane, Flint had woken; sitting up, a blot of dark discoloration on the floor had caught his eye. Focusing on it, horror had set in. He knew the scientists were arriving, but today that was as much a good thing as a bad one. Rolling off the bed, he took the three quick steps between it and the airlock, dropping to his knees on the floor next to the blot – it was Tori.

He took her shoulder, and rolled her over, but her eyes had closed. His attempt to test her pulse nearly singed the skin off his fingers, though. "Tori?" What was she doing in here? Hadn't she said something about not having an immune system? What fool thought had driven her into the one room on the asteroid where she would only die horribly?

Flint scooped his arms under her, and lifted. On the other side of the window, he saw a coffee smack into the floor, forgotten and forsaken. He had only to wait a moment for the airlock to cycle as the scientists hurried into a protective suit and came through it. Tori was handed off, and half-carried half-dragged back through the airlock. They dressed her in a suit before cycling back, but she was ferried out the door and up the corridor in short order.

Flint spread a hand on the window, watching her being taken away. Questions still remained about the situation… but everyone had abandoned him, in favor of following Tori out. There was no one left to ask… even if the comn had been on. He sighed, and sat down on the edge of the bed to wait. Maybe she wasn't too far gone, maybe she would survive that… and be back again eventually.

In the falling silence their departure granted, he focused on his hand. Lifting it from the glass, he looked at the palm. Raising his other hand to match the first, he studied them. It was the most fleeting grasp at sanity, but while he knew it had been the right thing to let her go, to hand her off, inwardly he knew he'd really wanted to keep her.

If he had, he wouldn't be alone anymore…

* * *

Commands and demands flew back and forth as fast as bullets, the scientists frenzied and hurried. Through a veil of environmental consolidation, and a seeming endless layer of seals and protective layers, they eventually got Tori hooked into a medical interface and responding to stimulus; it wasn't enough, though, given the nature of her current situation. Why she had walked into Flint's cell was never raised; she was, as Tam had pointed out, a valuable asset to the asteroid's staff.

Meting out punishment for disobeying an order would wait until much later… if in fact she was alive to receive it. Grace came in as quick as she heard, lending her expertise of the innermost workings of Tori's fragile system. She had been at the head of the team that brought the Spartan back from the brink many times since her arrival at the asteroid, and would be needed to stabilize any efforts to purge the infection spreading through Tori's defenseless systems.

Arrest began to seize much of her organs, shutting everything down, the cellular degeneration and rearrangement happening even on an outward, visible level. In a desperate stab at a last chance, Grace filled a syringe with dark red liquid from an unmarked bottle, and injected it right into Tori's jugular. The spastic twitching ceased almost immediately… following that, the irritation surrounding the pulled, stressed areas relaxed, and a moment later, she drew her first ragged breath on her own.

When Grace looked up, she found all the others were looking at her. Tam reached for the unmarked bottle, and looked at it curiously. Offering it to Grace, his expression asked the question.

Taking it from his hand, Grace answered simply, "It's blood."

"Blood?" Tam asked, astonished. "You gave her a couple cc's of _blood_, and it did that?"

"From the other Spartan." Grace nodded. "The Flood doesn't hurt him. I wanted to investigate it for any other properties, so I swiped a sample back when he first got here."

Tam looked down at Tori, then up at the monitors. Her fever was slowly ticking downward, away from the danger level, and her heart rate had slowed from the defibrillating hammering it had been doing before. She was also beginning to breathe easier, too. "Damnation, Grace." He looked back at the other scientist then. "That's some powerful T-cells."

"More than just." Grace looked at the bottle, then at Tori. "But the body knows how it is supposed to be shaped… and she's missing something."

"Yes, but we don't even know if they've the same blood type… yes, they both had augmentations and survived it. But still! You could have killed her just then."

Grace cast him a cross look. "Tori was _already_ going to die, just then, Tam. It was a gamble, and it paid off. I wouldn't be so quick to condemn my actions, were I you, considering the circumstances."

Tam shook his head. "But that sample was _contaminated_."

"So? She already had that in her. Obviously." Grace waved the bottle at him, dismissively. "What's a little more going to hurt, given that it comes with the only thing capable of fighting it off? She's stabilized… I can take it from here."

"Keep her in lockdown." Tam decided. "Improved or not, she's now a source of more Flood infection, too. I don't want that spreading through this asteroid." He turned away, stepping through the airlock into the room beyond, where he started stripping out of his containment suit. As he discarded it, he could be heard grumbling about Spartans and their seeming magnetism to Flood.

Grace watched as most of the others attending the situation began to file away, the team assigned Flint's case going first. Her own team had just been reassigned; if Tori turned out half as well as her initial reaction suggested, though, the odds of her being cleared for access to the asteroid at large again were fairly high. But while her exposure to the Flood spores had been indirect, there was also the question of the reaction of her system to a foreign immunity. The progress of the cellular transformation had obviously been arrested, but would that last, if her system rejected – or tried to reject – the foreign booster?

Usually the source of systemic rejection was based in the presence of the immune system itself – so the odds of that happening were fairly low. But the situation was fairly unique, and so too was Tori's physical condition. Being an augment built for war – ostensibly, to withstand massive punishment without falling or failing – the lack of presence of an immune system to match would change quite a few things about the anatomy of the situation.

Grace would need to keep her under close observation to be sure nothing else went horribly awry.

* * *

Jorg Anders had always loved technology above biology… the doctorate had landed him at the asteroid. The tinker fingers had landed him at the maintenance end. He didn't care – their equipment was top of the line, and being allowed to take it apart, tinker with it, and put it back together was great.

Being handed a full suit of working… or theoretically working… Mjolnir Mark VI, on the other hand… that was Christmas. He'd been working on the suit's minor functions at night and sometimes even at lunch. But now nearly all of that category was done, and it was time to move on to the bigger bits of machinery. He didn't have a clue how to replace or repair the missing chunks of ablative coating, or how to resurface the reflective ceramic layer that had been blasted away under bullet scarring. But he did know how to restore the powered joints, even without fresh, new parts. Most of the damage was superficial, barring the six punctures across the left side of the main chest piece.

Getting it to respond to programmed stimulus – like a self-diagnostic of the sensor array and data feeds that supplied information in realtime to the HUD – required it be completely assembled, however. Sealing the helmet down to the neck of the armor proved a difficult process, though, given the flexible nano-carbon weave it locked down to.

Jorg could only imagine having something of that sort hugged to his jawline, making an arc over the back of his head to connect his ears. Without a body to hold the suit to shape where it was designed to go over a joint, it was hard to make it stay where it ought in order to assemble it.

Finishing his struggle with it, he slid the seal catches down and waited a moment for the suit to communicate with itself while he unwound the jack cables that were attached to his computer. Reaching for the port at the back of the helmet, his cable head met resistance. After stabbing impotently at the stubborn port a few times, Jorg leaned over and peered at the port, his brow furrowed into annoyance.

Seeing where it ought to go, he tried to push the jack into the port again… and again, it wouldn't go in. Putting the cable down, he pressed his thumb down into the port at the bottom, testing.

Sure enough, a data card popped out far enough for him to grasp. Eyebrows up, Jorg slid it out, and looked at it curiously. The holographic interface glowed a sharp, brilliant blue around the hole through the center of the otherwise square card. It was more or less a standard AI hard drive chip… and the base power cell looked in good working order, given that it was glowing.

Turning away from the armor, Jorg poked a drive slot in his computer and dropped the chip into the tray when it slid out. He pushed the tray back in, and waited for the two to correspond so he could investigate the chip's contents.

He drew his hand away from the keyboard, though, when the lights, the computer, even the air filters in the ceiling overhead, all shut down at the same time.

"Ah, crap."

* * *

System reboot

ONI facility function class R-47-3-002.

Accessing authorization coding…

Authorization accessed successfully. Running data diagnostics… diagnostic complete. Systems functional to 92.003 percent base capability.

Rerouting memory to active buffers… transfer complete. Subject located.

_I see you there._


	8. Spirits Of Fire

**8: SPIRITS OF FIRE**

Food just didn't taste quite the same as it did the first time, when tasted twice.

He often considered what the Elites would think if they ever saw him like this… trapped behind a steel window, at the mercy of men who likely hadn't even _seen_ a gun until John had blown through, and dropped him off. He was sick beyond reconciliation, it seemed, and usually feeling as if a hundred Brutes had taken after him with sticks.

No… not sticks. Those bladed pistols they liked to shoot. That was more accurate. Sitting curled on the floor next to the toilet bowl, one arm draped across the seat and his chin tucked into that elbow, Flint found himself recalling the day he'd inadvertently stabbed himself in the guts with an energy sword.

Fun times.

Sarcasm aside, it had certainly been a better run than he was having now. Breathing often hurt as much as holding it did, amid all his other myriad woes. Going for weeks now without any sign of Tori – the one soul who had bothered to treat him like a living being – had left his tormented mind to conjure all the ways she might have died and been disposed of by now.

Any attempt to make the science staff turn the comn on had failed. Asking what had happened to her without it being on first was out of the question… the window being made of steel would muffle any sound he could emit, no matter how thunderous.

Each lapse of control, each loss of consciousness, was one more torment. Keeping himself from shattering into a billion pieces within the stark agony of the absolute clarity those events granted was growing more and more difficult. They didn't seem to understand… if he kept going like he was, he would more than likely die more horribly than anyone on the other side of that window had thus far conjured.

Looking into the lens of the universe and seeing himself reflected there had a haunting quality. Down at the darkest recesses of the bottommost pit, he had neither means nor much in the way of will to crawl back out. All that remained to him was up… or death, an ultimate release that would alleviate mortal woes like his body currently endured.

Mendez had not meant for him to have to go through this… no one had meant for the Flood to happen, not to him, not to anyone. It was an opportunistic predator, unable to exercise discretion or restraint when faced with a potential host, a tray of consideration begotten for little more than food.

What was the point? Flint wanted it to stop, wanted it to end. He'd found the knife Tori had brought, but it was a small thing, meant only to slice the soft complexion of foodstuffs. He could easily kill a man with it, though, because he knew how. He knew a million ways to make a body stop living, after all. Shoot it, stab it, crush it, tear it apart.

He'd seen more than he'd ever wanted to of what might easily be a version of the future, twisted and dark, a doom written into the stars to be read back like a bedside story to the unsuspecting. But was it? Images both fleeting and lingering would dance across the insides of his eyelids, taunting him, tormenting him. They erased any semblance of restful sleep, sending knives down into his mind as if it were a game to see how much he could take before it destroyed him.

Not too much more, now.

Not too much more…

* * *

Doctor Gary Tam stepped through the door expecting the usual. When he didn't see the Spartan through the window anywhere, he reached for the control unit router beside his terminal, and flipped the lights inside that room on. The change from dark to light changed little; the room still looked empty. Since finding Tori in there with him, he'd gotten more aggressive, sometimes pounding on the window like a caged animal.

Tam knew he wanted out… knew that such an outcome could never be allowed. He ran his eyes over the contours of the room's sparse contents, wondering where the Spartan could possibly be hiding. Curious, he stepped up to the sill, and flipped the comn on.

"Still with us, zero nine three?"

Silence greeted his query.

Tam's brow furrowed. Had he gotten out, somehow, during the night? That wasn't possible – if he had, Tam would have known the instant containment got breached. Even if he broke the window or pulled the doors of the airlock out, the alarms would still sound, and wake every member of the staff inside the asteroid. He glanced up, at the speaker port for that alarm. It was quiet.

Puzzled now, he looked back down, through the window again. Brow furrowed, Tam stepped sideways a few paces, trying to get some kind of angle on the room. Being as it was a short window – roughly eight feet long compared to the twelve-foot wide room – he couldn't see all the way around like he wanted.

"Zero nine – "

"My name is Zelisee." The interruption was sharp, the tone accusatory… the voice itself ragged and harsh. Tam closed his mouth around the "three" that he hadn't gotten to say, one brow quirked up. He still couldn't see where the Spartan was hiding.

"Zelisee, then." Somehow, though, it sounded like a strange word… hadn't his file claimed his name was Flint?

"Only Spartans call me zero-nine-three."

Another distinction? Tam shook his head, sadly… here came the tirade he'd been expecting, the long line of complaints and accusations lending to the methods behind the unfortunate Spartan's madness.

"You call me Chief."

Tam wrinkled his face. "Why Chief?"

"Because nobody calls me Chief." Came the answer. He sounded distant now, almost disinterested. "You wouldn't be pretending to be someone who gives a damn."

"Pretending?" Tam asked, feigning hurt. "I'm the one working my ass off to _save_ your miserable hide." The more he looked, the more he was convinced the Spartan had somehow crawled up into the comn ducting, because he couldn't see any sign that he was anywhere inside that room. Wherever he was, though, the comn could still hear him, and he could still hear the comn. Even when his volume trailed off, he still came through clearly.

"Save…?" the query had a contemplative note to it, as if he were considering the flavor of the word. "You're not going to save me while I'm in here."

"If I let you out, your infection would kill all of us. I can't allow that. You need to stay in containment until you're cleared of infection." Tam reasoned.

"What happened to Tori."

The bluntness of the statement – it was not a question – caught Tam flatfooted. He tried a few words before coming up with something else to say instead. "Don't concern yourself with my staff… you should focus on being more cooperative." He crossed his arms. "From the looks of things, these past few, you're going to need to, because aggression looks to come far too easily for you."

There was a considerable pause, before the sound of something shifting across a flat surface hissed through the comn. "… it's what I was made for."

Tam grunted, turning away from the window. As he did so, Vernon walked in, catching his attention. "Hey, Gary." Vernon greeted. "Glad you're in here, I had a thought last night, right in the middle of a dream. I spent breakfast running it past the Hans and Terrance, and I wanted to show you."

Forgetting the Spartan, Tam stepped across the room to the terminal where Vernon had gone, and leaned over the other man when he sat down. Almost before Vernon got the computer unit up and responding from standby mode, a chime snatched Tam's attention away from it.

"Hold on, that's the alarm I set to tell me when HQ's answer came in." Tam excused, shifting across back to his own preferred console. Plopping down in the chair, he straightened to the desk, and rattled his fingers across the keyboard to bypass the pass-protected user files.

Once in, he ran his eyes down the words that appeared inside the text window on the holographic screen. About halfway down, he paused, sighed, and sent his fingers up the bridge of his nose to push against his eyes. "Dammit."

Vernon turned in his seat, a curious expression on his face. "Sir?"

Tam took a deep breath, then let it out slowly as his hand came down from his face. Half-turning to look back at Vernon, he answered, "I guess it's not so bad."

"What isn't?" Vernon asked.

"ONI has decided that Flood is too dangerous and containment has never been enough in the past, so… they've ordered the Spartan euthanized and incinerated once dead. Then they want us to vent the ashes into vacuum."

Vernon grimaced. "Bit extreme… sir."

"Well, I can't say as I didn't expect that. ONI is twitchy… we had our chance to find a way to bypass the spores, and find a cure." Tam shrugged. "Time's up, now, I guess."

Vernon sat silent, expressionless, for a long while, seeming to study Tam as if thinking he'd seen a detail in passing and wanting to verify. But what he said next belied that theory. "What about Tori?"

Tam blew a sigh, and shook his head. "I don't know… there are confirmed traces of spores in her bloodwork, as well." He ran a hand over his head. "My guess is, asking after her specifically will only put off the inevitable arrival of a similar answer."

Vernon's responding expression looked drawn and unhappy, but he nodded. "Should I tell Grace?"

Tam shook his head. "No… no, I'll do it. I know she'll want to take care of Tori herself. Those two are pretty close friends, and knowing Grace, she'll want to be sure beyond a doubt that whatever happens, Tori goes without any pain." He shrugged. "The… I will admit I'm glad, in part… to not have to worry about containment anymore, to not need to… deal with his temper."

Vernon looked up when Hans walked in, but the process of lifting his gaze brought the opposite side of the room within peripheral, and something out of place there grabbed his gaze. Seeing his head turn, Tam looked over, too.

Flint was standing on the other side of the window, looking at them as if he'd heard every word.

Remembering suddenly that he'd turned the comn switch on, Tam jumped to his feet, swearing colorfully aloud. Vernon leapt to his feet as well, not understanding but recognizing the alarm in the other scientist.

"What is it? What happened?" Vernon asked, as Hans stopped where he stood, looking puzzled.

Tam quickly paced the length of the room and slapped his hand down on the comn switch, cutting off the sound. He shot the Spartan staring at him from the other side of the window a venomous look, before turning away. "I left the comn on just now… the bastard heard every word we just said."

"What did you just say?" Hans asked.

"ONI's response came in." Vernon supplied, feeling faint. "And the Spartan got to listen in on Tam telling me about their orders to have him terminated, effective immediately."

Hans quirked a brow at them both. "Well… I well imagine he might not appreciate that much, but why is that so bad?" He stepped casually over to the only idle console remaining, and awakened it. Tapping in the familiar command sequence, he then stood back, and casting a glance through the window, turned then to the other two men. Spreading his hands, he said, "Problem solved."

Tam looked past Hans' elbow at the screen, and saw the air filters had been reversed again. Used in the past to subdue the volatile Spartan, now it would make his passing that much easier to execute. But the relieved nod of appreciation for a quick-thinking staff member was short lived. The thunderous impact against the transparent steel pane was so loud it sent shudders through the room the three scientists stood in, dropping Tam back into his old chair when he lost his balance. All three looked towards the Spartan, wondering what could possibly have caused such a noise, only to stare in horrified transfixion at the terrible blister dented into the transparent metal.

Flint had torn the bed from its place bolted to the floor, and used it to slam the dent in the window. As the three scientists watched, he rammed the trashed bed into the dent again, denting it again in a worse, more warped way. The third impact left the bed as compacted as it was going to get, the metal frame smashed beyond recognition. An alarm chirped to life over Vernon's head, startling the terrified scientists back into action; immediately, all three fled the room. The door slid closed behind the last one right as Flint got the first stress fracture to form.

With his air running thin and the exertion of pounding his way through a sheet of steel an inch thick causing him to need more of that quickly depleting resource, Flint felt a certain justifiable urgency. Finally, the split gaped wide, and the air from the other side rushed through. The Spartan didn't spare the time to appreciate it, though, well aware that the whole asteroid was one mass of seals and environmental controls. They could easily cut off the room as a whole, not just his side of it, and he'd have to break his way through that far door, too, lest the air run shy anyway.

Grabbing the raw edges of the broken metal, Flint forced it apart by sheer brute force, prying the steel apart until there was a passage wide enough for him to squeeze through. He hit the floor on the other side and paused, though, dropping the primary use of his left arm and catching that shoulder with his other hand.

He could still use it, as long since proven, but pushing it hard made it hurt. There was just nothing current technology could do for a wound like he'd taken through that shoulder. If the strut had hit any farther over, or any farther down, even by a little bit, it would have killed him instantly. There were days when he'd pondered if that would have been a bad thing.

Striding across the room as he let go of his shoulder, Flint stopped to peel the control panel off the wall beside the door. He didn't need to test to know it was locked. Tam had specified that he must never escape containment. They were terrified of his condition. Likely, they attributed much of his behavior with its nature. After he'd pulled the control circuit board and the mass of attributed wires out, he looked for the ones attached directly to the door's function of opening and closing.

_"Zero-nine-three, what are you doing?"_ The voice coming out of the comn overhead gave him pause… he knew that voice.

Flint looked at the circuitry in his hands, and frowned. "… Thor?"

"_If you break containment, the entire asteroid will be contaminated. You will endanger the lives of everyone stationed here."_ The AI informed him.

Flint's responding grin was feral. "Endanger is the least of what I plan to do to everyone here, Thor. Open this door. Or don't. I can always break it open myself."

Thor made a tsking noise at him. _"You are a bio-hazardous security risk, Spartan. What exactly do you think you have to prove?"_

"I'm not going to sit still and let them kill me." Flint grumbled, looking critically at the circuitry again. "If you're not going to assist me, then stay out of my way." Giving that some thought, he looked up and added, "And I might note that if you don't assist me, I'll make a point to leave you behind when I bug out of here… so when they send a ship to fry this place, you'll fry with the rest of it."

Thor gave a frustrated sounding sigh. _"Chief Director Tam has initiated lockdown protocol. He intends to charge the ion purge. You will boil in your own juices very soon, even if you make it out that door and up the hall. You will need to breach the Quarantine Sector airlocks before you will be clear of it."_

"How much time?" He asked, lifting a likely wire and plucking it loose of the circuit board. The LEDs attached to the board in his hands winked green, changing the nature of the electronics. He looked up when the door slid casually open.

_"Two minutes."_

* * *

Grace looked up, noting the tone of that alarm. She'd never heard it before, except on drill. She sighed. "Looks like you weren't the only one."

From the other side of the glass, the responding answer sounded glum. "I don't know why I'm still in here, Grace."

The scientist turned to look at her, placing a hand on the glass. "The treatment may well have secured you safe passage through the infection, but it doesn't mean you're clear of contamination that can be passed to others. Don't worry… I'm working on that."

Tori unfolded her legs from inside her arms, and rolled off the bed to her feet. "Grace. We both know what that alarm means. Contamination is the least of our worries now."

Somberly, Grace nodded. "Yes, well…" She looked down, at the nano card in her hand. "Tam hasn't given us enough time to leave."

"You're not even going to try?" Tori asked, aghast. "Couldn't you come in here, would you be safe in here? It's an independent router from the main circuit…"

Grace just cast her a sad smile. "Tori… if you don't meet me in hell, I would be very surprised. The whole point of the ion purge is to erase all contaminant samples… and subjects."

Tori felt the blood drain from her face, as she pressed both hands to the glass. "He can't do this… this is wrong!"

Grace nodded. "I know, but that's the nature of the mechanism. My guess is he forgot we were down here too when he ran from your brother's wrath."

Tori scoffed. "He's not my brother."

Grace arched an eyebrow. "Are you not both borne of the same Spartan program?"

"That makes us brothers-at-arms, Grace… and even then, I'm inclined to protest the accusation. We've never worked together. He's not my brother. He's a Spartan, yes, and so am I, but that does not make us related."

Grace looked down at the card in her hands again, then back up, a mischievous twinkle in her eye.

Tori slapped the steel window. "Get that look off your face, Grace!" She shrieked, sounding scandalized and amused all at once.

"Oh?" Grace defended, raising both eyebrows. "Then why did you go into his room?"

Tori was quiet for a moment, giving that question some thought. She lifted her gaze back to the scientist's face again with an answer she felt comfortable with, but as soon as her mouth opened, the door to the corridor slid open, the lights above the locking panel shining an angry red.

Time was up.

"Grace!" Tori pressed to the window, horror shaping her expression as plasma fire surged into the room, obscuring her view and causing the comn to bark and hiss, melted at the other end. The window frosted over, leaving her blind to what was happening in the other room. But for all Grace had told her, the environmental hazard never came through to get Tori, too. She was left hammering her augmented fists on the searing hot metal window in isolated vain. "_Grace!_"

Even though she knew there was no way anyone could survive being bathed in plasma fire, Tori screamed anyway. Tears streaked down her face as she slammed her fists into the metal window, withdrawing only when she had scalded them beyond what she could bear. She collapsed against the side of the bed on the floor, and tucking her face into her knees, she coiled her arms around them, trying to shut out that terrible hiss.

Through her aching loss, she conjured ways she might strip Tam of his face before she killed him for this slight. They had all been on the asteroid together for years… most of them were friends, or at least friendly to one another. But Grace had been Tori's greatest friend.

And Tam had just murdered her.


	9. Feild Expedient

**9: FIELD EXPEDIENT**

Flint paused. Looking back at the sealed Quarantine Sector door, he could still hear the roar of superheated gasses scalding everything clean on the other side. Soon it would be vented away, replaced with hot water vapor to cool it all off, then that would be replaced with breathable atmosphere.

But that wasn't what had made him pause.

_"Zero-nine-three. We don't have time for second thoughts. You've just set off more contamination sensors, and the laboratory staff is evacuating to the next sector."_ Thor advised.

Flint blew a sigh. "Was there anyone else in there?"

"Why do you want to know that now? The only people besides you and me here are assigned staff. Anyone inside Quarantine would be staff."

Flint shook his head, turning away. "Is there a weapons locker on this rock, by any chance?" He began to make his way up the corridor, feeling directionless. The asteroid was proving to be quite a maze.

Thor seemed to think about that for a while – but being an advanced computer program, that while proved a short one. For him, though, it had to have been achingly long. _"Take the second hall on the left, and follow it to the fifth juncture. Then go right to the second door on the right. Go through that."_

Flint rolled those instructions around in his head for a moment, then moved out at a trot. By the time he'd made it to the door in question, he felt a little more lost than before, as he had no idea where the blast door to the next quadrant of the asteroid was, or how to get there. But approaching the door to the room he'd been directed to, Thor queued it to open as he got close. He stepped into the doorway, and paused.

Slumped across a desk smothered in electronic gadgetry and tools, the only other person present looked like he'd died from asphyxiation… and a few days ago. The smell of stale air in the room only confirmed this theory. Flint grimaced. Past him, though, stood the complete set of his old Mjolnir suit.

It looked like it had been repaired… partly. Large swaths of bullet scarring and several chunks of the ablative armor sheath were still chipped away, but he remembered each hit and knew it had not been hammered at after he'd lost it.

Stepping past the dead technician, Flint reached up, and unlatched the helmet from the throat seal. "Been at this for a while, I take it?"

_"I do not intend to be still in his disk drive when Tam sets off the secondary ion purges, no."_ Thor advised. _"I can delay it, but I cannot shut it off… much of the failsafes in this place are manual, not automatic. Dress quickly."_

"I've had a lot of practice with this stuff." Flint assured the AI, pulling the suit apart and putting it on. As the last of it went into place, he felt a little better. The HUD was working again, even before he had the throat seal completely down. Latching it in place over the environmental seals around his jawline, he ran his eyes over the readouts.

He grinned when he saw there was still dried mud caked into the edges of his visor, and a smear of the stuff had gone across the center magnification iris in the middle. Imperceptible on the outside, it warped the picture from the inside, so he spared a hand to scrub the dried smear off before turning to open the disk drive under the technician's elbow.

Lifting Thor's glowing chip from the drive tray, Flint reached over his own shoulder, and slid it home in the jack port at the back of his helmet. _"Good to be mobile again."_

"Shush." Flint advised, turning to go. "I don't suppose John left me my MA6B, did he?"

"I don't know… there are no especial logs pertaining to your equipment. It is safe to assume it is unlikely, however. I would proceed back the way you came, and head straight past the first corner you turned. At the end of that hallway should be a small weapons locker. Be advised it may have already been emptied, given the state of panic the staff are in."

"Great." Flint didn't mind his enemy having guns… he was rather used to it. Like most Spartans, he tended to view them as a kind of mobile weapons depot, sometimes running away with his reloads, sometimes bringing them to him, but at this point, he knew he'd prefer to have one of his own before going in.

It was like having a proverbial spoon in a literal firefight. At least he had his armor back… and while certainly not up to the task of outright warfare, it was operational again. Operational, perhaps, and beyond the capabilities of the lab staff to shut him down. Maybe he'd been wrong about them not having ever seen a gun… he stepped through the door to the weapons' locker, and looked over the single gun rack with a rumpled frown. It was empty, and so was the room, save a single magnum magazine on the floor at its base.

Squatting down, he scooped it up. No sense wasting ammunition, after all, and it was a full clip. He imagined the only reason it had been left behind was the word Thor had used to reason why it was all that was left. Panic.

They were scientists, not soldiers, and while he well imagined they might be out of practice with a pistol, the odds of them being willing to use them against him – even ineffectually – were very high at this point. Tucking the magazine into a belt pouch, Flint turned and left. Thor directed him up to the next quadrant door, where he used Tori's knife to break the seal between the powered, armored barriers. Once he had a place to put his fingers, he cranked the doors apart, his powered armor exoskeleton aiding greatly this time. The hard gears crushed and crumpled, wedging the door into its tracks the farther open he pushed them, but there was no way it would close behind him again, like the last one. He'd need some distance, perhaps a corner or two, between him and the next ion purge.

He got past the door, and the vents behind him rotated open, filling the passageway with plasma. Flint lit off at a run to escape it, aware his Mjolnir wouldn't save him from that mess. Around the fifth dodging turn in the corridors, he managed to leave the reaching fire behind. But real licking flames had been started, and doors usually left open for ages all up and down the hallways began to slam closed to contain the problem.

Automatic fire suppressants began to hose the corridors down, the mess splashing down outside the open, ruined quadrant blast door boiling away nearly as fast as it came down. Soaked in retardant and a little grumpy for it, Flint smashed through a third door, shouldering through the broken remains. The metal shards clawed more of the green off his armored hide, the sound of metal on metal screeching loudly up the corridors. Doubtless the staff knew exactly where he was.

Out the other side, he ran his hands over his arms and visor, slicking off as much of the retardant as he could, flinging it at the floor as he walked away. Finally reaching a place where no fire had set off the retardant nozzles, Flint rounded a corner and got pegged in the face by a lucky magnum round.

He jerked back, startled – there was nothing on the motion tracker at all. More shots zipped past him, but every last one missed, allowing him to see what it was that had fired at him. Huddled into the far corner at the end of the short corridor where it bent again, was one of the staff, a magnum clutched in both hands. That explained why he hadn't turned up on the motion tracker; but even as he continued to pull the trigger against an empty chamber as the Spartan approached him, motion from around that other corner lit up bright and red on his HUD now that it was within sensor range. Flint swiped the magnum out of the scientist's hands, hit the release, and smacked home his own magazine. Even before he'd turned the gun over in his other hand to jack the slide, the scientist had clawed to his feet, and was running for all he was worth away up the hall.

Flint lined him up with both sights and dropped him with a single shot. Ahead of him, the last of a party vanished around the next corner. He wondered where they were going, but he knew he was faster than they were, and lit out after them. All he needed was a sightline, now, thanks to the one too scared to run far enough.

Coming around that far corner, he dropped three more before the rest got away, around yet another corner. "Just how wiggly _is_ this hallway, anyway?" Flint grumbled, lifting another magnum off the third kill and taking the ammunition out of the fourth one's gun.

_"Quite."_ Was all Thor said.

"Great." Flint made sure both guns were loaded, put the ammunition in his belt, and resumed following. The walls were all the same color of slate gray, the floor a ruddy brown. On occasion a juncture would present itself, but most of them proved short offshoots to permit access to back chambers.

Thor felt certain the staff were going to consolidate into the shuttle bay, which was behind another armored airlock… mainly because it was exposed to vacuum each time the bay doors were opened. Flint wondered at their logic, going to such a dangerous place to hide, as the odds of a lab like this one getting a shuttle of its own were small.

If he really did infect someone and they turned into a real Flood form, sans controlling pod, being able to fly away with that aboard was a very bad thing. Much of the fighting with Flood had been in the spirit of denying it a way to get around on its own. Denying it ships, shuttles, starcraft of any kind. If the Flood could fly around from place to place at whim, they would consume everyone and everything, and absorb whole fleets.

He caught them again at a chokepoint, and after trading more than three magazines worth of ammunition with them, got them down to just the ones that had gotten through and away. On his way past the heap of bodies, he noticed one of them was still alive. Having taken a round in the fray, the shot had not killed him instantly.

Flint considered popping him and moving on, but paused instead. There was someone he hadn't seen yet, and he wanted to know why. Dropping to a knee, he grabbed a fistful of the survivor's shirt to haul him up with. He clawed at the armored gauntlet around Flint's forearm, fear etched into his features.

"P… please! Don't kill me!" He begged,

"Where is Tori." Flint asked.

"I don't know!"

Flint laid the barrel of the magnum on the arm that held the scientist, the business end aligned with his throat. "Where is Tori."

He blubbered for several seconds before recomposing enough to speak coherently. "Please don't kill me! Please! I'm just a scientist!"

Flint dropped the aim so the barrel of the gun rested on the man's thigh, and pulled the trigger. He jumped, and screamed, fighting against the hold on his shirt, but was unable to break away. "Where is Tori."

_"Has it occurred to you that maybe he really doesn't know?"_ Thor offered.

"It's a small asteroid." Flint answered, resting his gunarm's elbow on his own thigh. Giving the whimpering scientist a shake, he asked again. "Come on, where's Tori? She with them?" he pointed with the gun through the choke point in the hall, after the long since gone escapees.

The scientist shook his head, his jaw clenched and his face streaked with tears from the pain. When he got his jaw to unlock, he took a ragged breath through his mouth. "She was in Quarantine."

Flint paused.

"Spartan? Snap out of it. We're done here."

The magnum went to the man's open mouth, and silenced his horrified scream with a thunderous report of its own. Dropping the body, Flint turned around.

_"What are you doing? Quarantine was sterilized. There is nothing alive in there anymore. We need to find and neutralize the remainder of the asteroid's staff before they get behind the next quadrant door."_ Thor protested, even as Flint pulled into a run.

He didn't answer the AI, even ignoring his warnings about running through the freshly plasma-bathed halls of the quadrant between him and his destination. Moving quickly on Mjolnir-powered legs got him to said area almost before it would have been safe to do so, and he left bootprints in the softened metal flooring as he strode through anyway.

Being crafted of a much sturdier material, it was unlikely the Mjolnir's boot soles were leaving anything behind, like a standard Marine's footwear might have, so the metal he walked across being hot enough to be soft enough to leave impressions didn't bother him at all. He'd walked across hotter stuff in the past, though in defense of the Mjolnir, he'd done it at a dead run at the time.

People had been known to take flowing magma _barefoot_ at a dead run. It really all depended on just how much questionable ground one had to cover. Being shot in the face had told him the shielding mechanism wasn't online, and that was if it even still worked anymore. So walking through an active purge was not on the to-do list, although he knew the floor was likely much cooler in Quarantine than it was where he was walking now.

Indeed, arriving at the first door he'd gotten through, he stepped up out of squishy flooring onto firmer footing, and thought it felt a little odd. It was like going from dirt to crete, as one depressed under his weight and the other did not. He'd run over enough dirt to be used to it, and hardly any crete or similar flooring by comparison. Steam curled off the walls where the water vapor had condensed after the atmosphere had been let back in, giving the place an unnatural fog. While he understood the look wouldn't last, as the steam would find where it wanted to be and stay there fairly quickly – as most water was apt to do – in the mean time his mental processes considered the odds of a firefight within such conditions as he was looking at right then.

The transition between stalking through hazy excess moisture and needing to stop and wipe it off his visor every few minutes to coming out into mainly clear air again proved interesting, as the sudden clarity – and being able to see all the way to the end of the long corridors again – caused him to stop walking, backpedaling a few strides even before he realized what he was doing.

_"Is there something wrong with you, zero-nine-three?"_ Thor asked, puzzled. _"Your organic processes seem to spike at the oddest of times… there are no enemy here. It is empty. Where in the world did you get reason for an adrenalin spike?"_

"Shut up." Flint grumbled, closing his eyes for a moment and shaking his head. Clarity was something he'd learned to fight against, to reject, almost to the point of being unwilling to look out across a landscape on a clear sunny day. It was hard to make a distinction, but not nearly as difficult as explaining why he reacted to his environment the way he did… who would believe him, anyway? No… best just to keep it to himself. They'd call him crazy. Likely rattle to ONI, and then they'd send someone to make sure he didn't ever see the following day.

Not good prospects. As for Thor… he needed to know just about as much.

_"If there is something wrong with you, Spartan, then I need to know about it."_ The AI insisted.

"No, there isn't, and no, you don't." Flint snapped, irate. Squaring his shoulders, he proceeded forward again. He wasn't really entirely sure why he'd come back this direction, or what exactly he expected to find. But he paused once he reached the door to his old cell and looked in through it, though he didn't step through or go in.

Why was he here again? If he took enough time, the ion purge for the next quadrant up would be cleared and cooled again soon, and his absence at the fore of that cleansing might give him an advantage when next he went back through it, giving the scientist staff the false idea that he'd finally been gotten rid of.

But this wasn't about that. Some little voice in the back of his head, somehow a survivor of everything he'd been put through, insisted he go this way, look through these corridors. Flint wasn't sure why. Just that since his instinct said so, that it merited investigation. Something was back here, something that needed attention of some kind. Machines got glitchy, AI's went rampant, programs became slow and unresponsive. But instinct didn't lie. Not so far.

But what was this? What could have survived a bath in super heated gasses, and then boiling, live steam? The answer, he supposed, wasn't likely to be found in the room he was looking into. Turning away from it, he moved on. Curiosity began to build atop the suspicion the original feeling of "something behind me" had granted, and he found himself exploring down all the little side passages into all the little isolation labs, finding along the way more than a dozen more segregated environmentally isolated chambers with attached observation rooms.

Much like the one where they'd kept him, for a while.

For… how long had it been? The time had been so agonizingly uneventful, it had seemed to blur… but if it was shorter than the five or six month mark he felt he'd be a little surprised. Certainly he'd been around here for at _least_ that long. Maybe more. Heck… maybe a year, already, given the staff's habit of putting him down for extended periods. He led his progress with both magnums, and cut pies behind every door he got to open. Ragged senses kept insisting that if it didn't readily part, that meant there was someone hiding inside, and his exhausted, frayed mind conjured images to match the ideas; crouched, hiding Covenant, waiting to spring out, Brutes poised just beyond the doors with their bladed guns and their magnetic displacement hammers.

Grunts, Jackals, Drones, the whole lot. By the time he'd reached what he was pretty sure was the opposite end of the quadrant from which he'd started out, Flint was so worked up he felt disappointed that he _wasn't_ finding anything that was going to jump out at him, and if something finally had, he might have simply sighed at it and said, "it's about damn time."

Finally, the adrenalin gone, his muscles twitching in irritation, and exhaustion nibbling at the back of every motion, he spread a hand against the wall next to the last door – it was right up the hall from the next sealed blast door, the lights winking indication of a vapor cycle completing. Given five, ten, maybe all of fifteen minutes, and it would automatically unlock and open of its own accord. He leaned on that arm, letting his head drop for a moment as he closed his eyes. The only thought echoing back and forth through his brains was the only one capable of condemning everything and anything he did here;

The likelihood of the asteroid having a shuttle of its own were infinitesimally small.

No matter if he butchered them all, no matter if he killed until even the lights were out forever, it wouldn't change anything. He'd still be a prisoner, trapped on the asteroid, and without proper signal code authorization, he'd stay that way.

No one would ever come to visit a lab like this one that suddenly and inexplicably went radio-dark. There just was no one that _brave_… or stupid… left in the universe after the first Flood attack took place. If anyone ever finally did, it would likely be several decades later, and purely for the paperwork's sake. And if they were paranoid – which pretty much everyone out there _was_ – they'd bring guns. Big ones, effective ones.

_"Spartan, there is definitely something not right with you."_ Thor said, interrupting the thought spiral. _"Have you been experiencing psychological anomalies?"_

"I don't know how many times I've told you to shut up." Flint grumbled, unhappily, "but I'm getting really rather tired of needing to keep doing it."

"I am not going to let this drop until I am satisfied you are qualified to be in possession of those firearms, soldier. Do not get smart with me. This is a serious matter."

"You want me to put you down?" Flint asked.

Thor heaved an unhappy sigh at him, but, blessedly, was quiet at last.

Supposing his victory with the AI was short lived – as any won against such entities usually were – Flint lifted his head. Might as well get a move on, get something done before he got irritated at the ones-and-zeroes nutcase again. Dropping his hand from the wall, he turned towards the pressurized door, and began to walk that direction.

"You've got to be shitting me."

Flint stopped mid-step, startled. "…what?"

_"You go through the trouble of poking your nose into every inconsequential corner, hatchway, cabinet and cranny within Quarantine, and right when you'd be finally done with it… you're going to leave without looking in the last room? Are you _sure_ you're sane, in there?"_ Thor asked.

Flint thought about it for a moment, then turned around. "Okay, okay. Here I was going to humor you and just go." Stepping up to the last door he hadn't been through yet, Flint keyed the thing to open, and when it slid back out of the way, he stepped inside.

The look was pretty typical; a couple facing banks of computer terminals aligned with each opposite wall, the observation window's facing layer boiled off so it looked like frosted glass, and… where did that carbon come from?

Curious, Flint squatted down, looking at one of what appeared to be six heaps of chalky black stuff on the floor. Each one was about three to five inches in depth, roughly fifteen to twenty inches wide and some three to four feet long. One of them, he noted, was piled partly atop one of the blinking, panicking consoles, partly in the corresponding chair, and partly on the floor under said chair.

He stood, the motion quick. "Good god."

_"What?"_ Thor asked, sounding nonchalant.

"These were people." Flint answered, his brows meeting behind the visor. What remained of them, anyway. There were no bones – but the remains had not been cooked to the point of ashes. That they were chalky, looked a little like flakes, and were still black was a testament to that much. But dead, yes, and killed, it seemed, by their own panicky coworkers.

_"You're concerned about this why? Just an hour ago you yourself were killing them. One of which, I'll note, after a brief torture and interrogation. At point blank range."_ The AI pointed out.

"Yeah. But that's different." Flint looked around at them one more time, noting positions relative to the items in the room. One was piled against the center of the window in the back, suggesting someone had been beyond said window when the purge came and got them. What did that mean?"

_"Different? Different how, Spartan? You would have spared these here?"_

Flint shook his head. "I didn't say that. They were staff… they were scientists. You don't kill your own in a firefight. You don't kill your own, period. I'd have shot them, sure. But their fellow scientists? Why? What made the distinction for _them_? I was trained to look at that sort of thing, Thor, so humor me questioning my findings."

He stepped over one spreading pile, the mere motion of stirring the air enough to walk by causing the heaps to spray outward across their respective surfaces. Approaching the backmost pile, Flint dipped a finger in the tablespoon or so of the black stuff piled on the sill over the comn switch, and flicked it off. Who else did they have, trapped in isolation?

"What did they have in here?" Flint mused aloud, watching it drift to the floor, where the rest of that individual was piled. A small noise, almost inaudible, gave him pause, so he stopped what he was doing and listened, holding as still as possible. When something slammed into the other side of the window, though, he sprung near clean out of his skin, Mjolnir and all, jumping away in a fright. Both magnums appeared out ahead of him, near crushed in his shaking grips, with only a last-minute injection of thought stopping him from firing off those first two rounds.

_"Easy, Spartan. They cannot get through the window… else, they already would have."_ Thor assured him.

"What's in there?" Flint breathed, feeling his heart slamming in his ears.

_"Possibly someone not unlike yourself… contaminated with something rare, strange, and incurable."_ Thor gave one of those audible shrugs for emphasis.

"What?" Slowly, the magnums' aim began to dip. "Why? Who?"

"You really expect me to know? This place was not designed for an AI feed circuit. As I have already explained, much of the functions are manual start and manual stop. I suspect the nature of the facility's use is a good reason for why that is, but all the same… I do not know."

Flint pulled his guns in, cupping his right arm under his left for a moment and resting them that way. The unnatural tension was making his shoulder throb, and that in turn made it ache. Holding anything – even just the arm itself – out ahead of him under those circumstances was nigh impossible anymore. Grimacing, he worked the joint, rolling it once, then dropped his guns to his thighs and hit the magnetic clasps that usually held sidearms to his Mjolnir.

He stepped up to the airlock that separated the two rooms, and after smacking the control embedded in the door itself a few times, got it to respond, and finally, make the doors open. Airlocks were hardly ever locked – sealed by nature, and usually accessible from one side only, there was hardly ever a need for locks. Once they were open, Flint walked in, and waited for the mechanism to decide it was okay for the next set of doors to open.

The process took a standard minute and a half, but the monitors on his HUD didn't register any especial atmospheric change when the doors ahead slid open after the doors behind had finished sealing shut. Puzzled by that, he stepped forward, to see just who – or what – was being kept inside.

Surely it wasn't –

It was as tall as he was and it had wrapped itself around him bodily almost before his first forward step was completed, knocking him back into the airlock in a stumbling frenzy to get loose from whatever it was. Panic had assaulted his frazzled nerves at the attack, even though he didn't seem to be taking any kind of real damage, so when he pried it away, he did so with all the gusto and zeal he'd have put forth had it been a Flood combat form and he'd known full well that it was.

But getting it off of him earned him a better look at it, and his motion halted at arm's length.

"… Tori?"

Instead of answering, she swatted his hands off her shoulders and grabbed him by the helmet. He wasn't sure if she even bothered with the latches or the seal ring, but she pulled it right off, and he heard it hit the floor with a loud metallic clank just a heartbeat later. She sent both arms up around behind his head as if in some preemptive motion, but there was absolutely nothing about her manner to suggest it was an aggressive move.

He got his mouth open around the first word of a question, but didn't get to make a single sound, when she buried it under a kiss.


	10. Ponderous Circumstances

**10: PONDEROUS CIRCUMSTANCES**

She'd never heard of a Spartan doing that… it was almost signature of slackjawed shock… but if he even _remembered_ how to ask 'what the hell' anymore, it wasn't evident. Tori spread a grin at his expression, even as his eyebrows slowly creeped towards one another, the beginnings of mental reboot showing. Just when she thought he might never recover, he finally said something; but it wasn't what she'd expected him to say.

"What are you doing in here?"

Tori huffed at him. "Why do you _think_? I did a stupid thing, and got my ass contaminated."

"Seems it was deliberate." Flint answered, sounding just as puzzled at her as before.

She grinned again, well knowing what proof of that he was referring to. Softer, she asked, "How'd you find me, Flint?" Over her immediate amusement, her prior mood was reclaiming her manner.

"I asked." He told her, simply. Raising an arm, he lifted her hands one at a time off his shoulders, and let them fall however she chose to allow. "Want out?"

Tori's eyes followed that dismissing hand, before she simply nodded; there was too much armor plating in those gray eyes to tell what lay behind them. Figuring out what he really thought at any given point was a matter of true logistical genius, and she knew she didn't always possess enough. He took a step back, bent, scooped up the helmet, and with it in hand, turned to go.

Following, she braced for an imagined scene beyond the containment chamber she'd been trapped in, but all she saw was streaks of soot and heaps of carbonized coal. While she had names, faces, for every heap of the stuff, and knew what they'd been doing, how they'd been posed, even what they'd been holding a moment before the blast, none of that remained. Grace's data pad was gone, likely reduced to toxic vapor and swept out with the last of the plasma when it was done cooking everything clean.

Flint walked past them as if he didn't know what they were, but she knew he had to have already deduced as much truth – being as they were neutral presences at best, though, he wasn't liable to even spare them a second look, now. By contrast, Tori cast each a sad look before turning away, feeling a budding anger at Tam as she stepped past each spreading pile of black flakes. Cooked for a few seconds longer, she didn't doubt for a moment they would have bleached into soft white ash.

Memory of Grace's last words followed her down the hall after Flint, but before he'd reached the first corner, he'd slung that helmet up, and sealed it down around his throat again. Hopping a quick step up to close the leading distance between them, Tori reached forward, and clawed his secondary magnum right off his thigh. The motion caused him to flinch and spin around, the one already in his hand leveled right at her mouth. Tori jerked back, startled at the reaction, but after a second, he let his aim down. Without a word, he turned away again, and resumed walking.

Tori frowned at his back, beginning to get a brand new feel for the depth of the issues floating behind that steely armor in his eyes; there were raging, feverish nightmares haunting his peripheral, and unless she made a point of being obviously Tori, she'd be mistaken too easily for something or someone else.

And if his reaction a moment ago was any indicator, that kind of event would very probably leave her very dead. The sad part was, that he likely wouldn't even realize he'd just shot her until after the fact.

Frightening.

She followed him up the corridor, listening to the overheads hiss softly. Though in place ever since the facility's completion, the purges had never actually been used. The level of scathing damage it left in its wake was atrocious; consoles and bare surfaces had been scalded, leaving things like the emitters for the monitors dead and useless. Observation glass – usually tempered transparent steel – had been boiled at its outermost layer, lending to the frosted look. It made the windows useless for looking through unless one was right up against it.

With the catastrophic loss of equipment, the elimination of some of the staff had to be just a technicality on the itinerary. By the time they reached the first blast door Flint had gotten through, Tori was nursing a seething hatred. She hoped the presence of the laboratory's personal stash of firearms on the escapee didn't mean he'd already wiped out all the surviving staff… if in fact there were any, after Tam was done with them.

If she could find Tam… she knew she wanted to tear his throat out herself. The gun in her hands only solidified the feeling for her, gave her nigh-forgotten SPARTAN-program training some strength to dust itself off, initiating the mental prep before any engagement.

Ahead of her, Flint was having similar thoughts; but with different points of connection. He rather wanted to catch Tam for being so cruel, for insisting that Flint fall headlong down that hole he'd been clawing at the walls of, in a desperate attempt to escape utter insanity.

Escape had really become the only avenue of avoiding that end, but the standing orders sent in from ONI had been the tipping point. He was used to being sent on suicide missions, sent against impossible odds, but he was never once told to go on a mission and _not come back_. The assumption was always left open that he was rather expected to return… and sometimes, in a timely manner. Being commanded outright to die was not something he was willing to follow. It was, he felt sure, a bogus order.

Flood contamination and infection never crossed into that line of reasoning, never once entered the logical deduction pathways. He wasn't sure who it was that wanted him dead, or even why, but surely such an order had not come from anyone inside ONI or even the UNSC, both of which had interests invested in keeping Spartan units around.

Dealing with a single small asteroid staffed by soft scientist types to sideline the execution of that order seemed an easy enough task. It was the next step that daunted him; well knowing the state of repair his suit was in was not good enough to see him through vacuum, there remained no way whatsoever to get _off_ the asteroid.

So how to complete extraction?

Thor, for his own merit, had remained quiet for equally as ponderous reasons. Watching the Spartan return for one of his own, and then come within a millimeter of shooting her in the head himself had been of interest. He wasn't even remotely qualified to hold that magnum, but who was going to take it from him? If the AI shut down his armor, he'd just peel out of it and keep going. Him being armorless wouldn't stop the asteroid staff from dying.

Case in point, if Thor made any kind of protest at all, all that would result under the circumstances would be his own abandonment – in an inert state – or actual destruction. Neither were good outcomes, and core processing insisted if he just rode this out far enough, he'd get into some better circumstances. And when that happened, _then_ he could make his case.

Systematic elimination of ONI personnel had never been on the list of things needing done, although under the circumstances, how was there any other way to proceed? His carrier would take him to other more likely places. None of the scientist staff had the proper clearance to be permitted access to his subroutines. It was a trade-off, really. Sit quietly and let an out-of-control murderous Spartan flatten an ONI facility, or remain inert for the rest of his projected lifespan? There was valuable, necessary information required in a timely manner outside of this asteroid. And Thor held much of it. There was just no justification for sitting pretty and doing nothing.

It was, he supposed, a small out-of-the-way facility, one that didn't have any immediate necessary function to the main operations of ONI's core. Perhaps that would keep the cleared technicians from wiping his core out after they'd gotten their intel upload.

Perhaps.

Perhaps it was better to classify the enemy in the same way that the rampant Spartan had; those who stood in the way of mission completion. Everything leading to this moment, this place, had not been a deliberate delay. Discovery and recovery of a secondary Spartan unit was perfectly legitimate cause of going on a side-mission off from returning Thor to ONI hands.

That there was also another ONI AI in questionable environment down there with said other Spartan had solidified that detour. But getting wiped out, getting shot down, being clawed apart by an alien parasite… those were never a part of _anyone_'s plans, be they spook, command or field grunt. Nobody wanted to be consumed by Flood.

Subsequent depository at a facility where it was supposed the afflicted might be cared for was only a natural deduction of proper reasoning. That Thor had not been taken with Cortana on to a more proper facility for processing only suggested intel negligence… the second Spartan hadn't known about him.

Oh well, shit happens.

In the meantime… said rampant Spartan who had failed to find competent medical assistance here was his _only_ qualified carrier _out_ of this miserable outdated asteroid. They didn't even have an AI interface… let alone an empty one they "didn't use".

It was just sad, sad, sad.

The fourth quadrant was already cool again by the time they reached it, Flint taking a moment to check some of the side passages just in case before moving up, and with a few one or two worded directions from Thor, through to the shuttle bay. Tori kept pace easily, but she stalked rather than paced, suggesting she didn't care if her prey saw her coming.

Flint cast her attitude only a brief thought, wondering why she would want to murder her own coworkers – she had professed earlier to have been in this asteroid for the last thirty some odd years. That, in turn, would suggest she knew everyone who worked here possibly better than even they would. But the thought passed, and just a moment after, he saw the bay airlock.

He reached it, but before he could begin to assess the issue of making it open, Tori shouldered into him, shoving him aside and out of the way. Back stepping a moment to consider that, he watched her punch in the keycode like each key's depression was an insult. She looked up just a half-breath before the doors slid back, and stepped into the lock chamber without even checking it first.

A little confused, but unwilling to be left behind, Flint stepped in after her. Behind him, the first door slid closed, and ahead, the second's indicator lights winked green and slid back. The first thing Flint saw was the barrel-end of a magnum pointed in his direction, but when he stuck his own up to counter any shots it might fire, he never got more than up before Tori grabbed the magnum and shoved it back down again.

She cast him a warning look before stalking openly out into the bay. Remarkably enough, nobody shot at her. "_Tam_!" She screamed, the sound echoing harshly in the circular shuttle bay.

"Tori?" Someone called back, from somewhere tucked into an indentation in the wall some ten or twenty yards from the airlock. Flint stepped out of the airlock and did a sweep, taking a count of nearly fifty such places, aligned down the whole of the circular wall. On the left, he saw a scientist poke his head out, but he kept watch on the right just in case some were hiding there, too. Tori was standing downrange of the partially emerged scientist, leaving him a little reluctant to shoot past her.

But it was hard not to try. The end result was that Tori was scissored between the aim of a jumpy, armed scientist, and the aim of an unhappy Spartan. Flint, to his credit, held his fire.

"_Tam_!" Tori screamed again, stalking past the scientist who'd answered. "Where are you, Gary?? I know you're in here!"

Flint tapped his finger on the trigger of the magnum, the sights lined up neatly with the first scientist's ear as he watched Tori stalk on past his position. If her goal was to get someone in particular to come out, his shooting this one would not help matters. He growled under his breath, but restrained the urge to pull that trigger his finger kept touching. The level of restraint it took made his hand ache, though, and he hoped Tori was quick about this.

As a result of the delay, the scientist looked past Tori at last, and finally saw Flint. His eyes got as big as his open mouth, and he scrambled out of his hiding place to run flat out past Tori and duck into a different indentation. Flint didn't mind – fear often forced the untrained to give away their fellows. Now he knew which side of the bay where all that man's friends were staying. Sidestepping out into the middle of the landing pad, he kept his magnum trained on that wall, checking out each hollow as it came into view.

Tori let out a feral sounding growl, but she was way ahead of Flint, having passed up a few of the other huddled scientists already. "Tam! Get your ass out here right now!" Stepping up to the next one, she stopped, turning to face it fully. "You spineless coward."

Tam looked up at her from where he'd crouched in the hollow of the indentation, the worry etched into his features. "Tori, what are you doing here? You've contaminated us all!"

She raised the magnum at him, and cupped her other hand under the butt to steady it. "I don't give a shit about containment anymore, you worthless snot."

"Whoa!" He held up his own hands, palm-out, the pistol in one of them pointed up. "Easy! You don't have to shoot me! What the hell is that going to solve? Put the gun down, Tori, we can talk… we can talk… whatever you think you've a grievance with, I'm willing to talk about it."

Tori shook her head, blinking the tears out of her eyes. "I don't want to talk about it, Tam. I don't want _you_ to talk about it."

"Put the gun down, Tori!" Tam begged, starting to stand up, his hands still held out between them. "You don't want to do this…"

"I don't want to do this!!" She screamed at him, lurching forward a step, shoving the magnum at his face. He flinched back, smacking bodily off the wall behind him. "What do you mean, I don't? Of course I do!"

"But _why_?" Tam blabbered, trying to wave the gun down. "We've known each other for years, Tori! We're _friends_!"

"Not anymore." Tori whispered, testing her grasp on the gun, and curling her index finger around the trigger. His eyes got bigger, as he focused on her face. "You murdered Grace."

Tam's mouth opened to protest, but the words were shoved back into his throat before they could come out when the bullet tore out through the back of his mouth, drenching the wall behind his head in blood, bone shards and brain matter.

As Tori watched the body sag to the floor, she heard four stray shots and nine timed and aimed ones go off behind her. She knew which was which, and she knew the names of all of the staff being cut down, but all she could do was stand there, torn inside, staring down at the body of the first man she'd killed since she was fourteen.

And while in as much need to avenge Grace as she'd been, he had not been wrong; she knew him. She'd known them all. As silence boomed down through the fading echoes of the final gunshot, Tori raised her eyes, her gaze unfocused. At any moment, she expected the tenth round to discharge, to end her moment of horror.

They had been, as much as she might have one, a family to her. Some of them didn't get along, some of them did, with each other. But most of them got along nicely with Tori, and the ones she interacted with regularly had been the closest. Among them, foremost, had been Grace. She was the proverbial mother/sister/best friend, both in charge of keeping tabs on Tori's medical condition as well as team lead in Tori's department.

Losing her had felt like her heart being torn out of her chest through her ribs, and shown to her before it could stop beating. Putting a bullet in Tam's head for that affront had been the only way she'd known how to express that torment. But now all of them were gone… not just Grace, not just Tam. All of them. And, she remembered, she had been one of them.

Which meant, likely, more to the Spartan behind her than the fact that she'd once been just like him.

Time drawled on until at last, she'd caught her gasping breath, and that tenth shot was never fired. Finally, she raised an arm, and sopped the tears off her cheeks, pausing to wipe it under her nose too before turning around, to see if maybe he'd gone.

He hadn't.

The magnum in his hand was at his side, on the left… pointed at the floor. Though he could have been looking anywhere, she felt she knew he was looking at her, pointedly, specifically, and watching for her next move. Should she shoot him, then, given that had he not broken containment, Tam would never have fired the purge, and thus never killed Grace?

The line of logic was sound enough, but it didn't feel right to her. Still, it remained. What she should do next remained. What she _could_ do next remained. For a moment, she started to lift her magnum, but it fell back to her side before it had risen from there more than an inch. She could have just twitched and made as much motion.

Swallowing a sob, she turned away. She knew he watched as she walked towards the airlock, but while she kept her head up and her shoulders square, she felt she almost didn't care anymore. Everything she'd ever known had come apart at the seams, and now all she had left was the sole reason that it had; that crazed, demented Spartan standing there watching her leave.

Entering the airlock, she contemplated activating the exterior iris once she'd gotten inside, and just sucking it all – him, too – out into space where she'd never need to look at any of it ever again. But instead, she reached the airlock, and once inside, hit a wall, slid down it to the floor, and dropped her head onto her knees to cry.

She heard him step through the airlock doorway, striding past her to the other side of the small pressure chamber, and touch the activation key. The first door slid shut, and the second one opened… and a moment later, the sound of the pressure alarm beeping overhead raised her head.

Puzzled why the iris would have opened without prompting – it couldn't be done from inside the airlock, after all – Tori looked first at Flint, who hadn't moved, then around the airlock's interior. "What's going on?" She asked.

"Ship incoming." Flint answered, deadpan.

Tori pushed back to her feet, feeling sore at him for being so cold. But instead of raging at him – and perhaps not so unwisely – she turned around him into the corridor outside to look at the wall console. Touching the overhead activating node, she bypassed the request for her security pass – she didn't have it with her whether it was good enough or not – and then called up the itinerary.

The UNSC had sent their re-supply, apparently… because there was no indication of alarm or armed incursion. But the re-supply birds did not look like bombers, and she swore she knew the landing craft in the bay was a bomber of _some _kind. Shaking her head at the implied situation, she turned and hit a fist off Flint's armored chest. "Follow." She left no room for negotiation, she hoped, with the word. Turning, she took a determined stalk up the corridor away from the way they'd arrived here. Hopefully his odd ability to navigate the asteroid wouldn't offset her wont to pull him away from the inevitable next firefight.

Doubtless whoever was in that Longsword was armed, or at least armored, and if the feeling about it she had was any indicator of the reality, she did not feel like scraping _more_ crap off the decking.

It was bad enough she was trapped here with a green man who seemed less sane some times than the situation did. She did not need it to get worse. As if it really could…


	11. Leap Of Faith

**11: LEAP OF FAITH**

"_Departing the only exit off this rock with extraction sitting on the pad seems a folly to me, zero-nine-three._" Thor mentioned.

He'd taken his time to say anything; but leaving was mainly inevitable at this point. Even for Tori, or if anyone else remained, them as well. Flint knew a place like this – be it asteroid, ship, or orbital station – could simply not run without a full staff. And as far as he'd been able to tell, he'd got them all. All, but the one that Tori had reserved for herself. _You murdered Grace_. Probably one of the coal heaps in the observation end of the isolation chamber he'd found her in… for a Spartan, she had her oddities, but it kept her in a logical line of sight. Once a Spartan, he figured, always a Spartan.

But that didn't keep thirty years of science from making her strange.

"Shut it." Flint grumbled. All his senses felt raw on the edges, simmering with bright contrast causing a constant array of endlessly distracting elements. It was a lot like trying to walk through a field of madly whirling paper wind wheels, and not look at them. But even though he felt pretty certain he wasn't hearing anyone else but Tori, he knew what he was seeing out of the corners of his eyes were people.

Lots and lots of them… one at a time, mostly, but… a lot of them. Down the halls, around corners, just inside doorways… he couldn't put the magnum away, but it was harder and harder the more he walked not to train it along wherever he pointed his eyes. It was instinct, ground down into his head until he could do it in his sleep. It was part of the training he'd been given on the road to earning his first set of Mjolnir. Every Spartan to make it past fifteen had that. Even those… kids… the Spartan III's.

Finally, blessedly, Tori stopped. Flint wasn't even sure how far they'd come anymore, let alone remembered how to get back to that bay. If Thor was any help in that direction, though, he might find time to marvel at the fact. In the mean time, the only thing keeping him from flying completely off the handle was that Tori had yet to react to any of the flickering perceptions at the edges of Flint's vision, lending him to suppose they were just exactly what they were – imaginings.

When she went through a door she'd needed to pause to hack the lock of, he stayed outside. Rather than watching what she was doing, he leaned a shoulder on the wall, and tried not to think. Shortly, he realized he'd leaned on his left, so he rolled to his back instead, and closed his eyes. The gun changed hands, and he tried to dig his fingers into the joint through his armor, but he knew before he tried it would be a futile effort. Sometimes it would hurt without prompting, but he knew he was wearing on it by staying so tense. The only cure for the tension – the apprehension – would be a stiff knock to the head by something big and heavy.

Flint half-smirked, imagining a certain overgrown Elite that matched that description. He hadn't seen 'Taramee in a while, but the simple fact was that while he appreciated the alien company in that they didn't press him with questions, he also preferred to be alone, mainly because the emptiness asked fewer questions than even the Elites did.

And the last time he'd seen G'wi, there had been questions. People were beginning to put two and two together, and soon there would be no hiding, no denying… but how could he shake the problems out in English, in a way to make someone else understand? There simply wasn't a way. No words for the haunting clarity, no words for the damning voices in the back of his head. No words to describe why he flinched at empty air, and when there really was something in it, it got shot at more often than not. Even when it didn't really need nor deserve to be.

Being out by himself had delayed the need to address that decaying situation, but there was no way he could justify disappearing yet again. ONI would want to know what happened, the UNSC would want to know what happened. People would ask questions. And this time, he was fairly certain, they would not be placated with just an AAR… especially since those had become more and more vague the more of them he wrote. That there simply wasn't one for the last mission – Thor's retrieval and John's subsequent rescue – was just another step in the same old direction.

To say there were significant gaps and blanks in the story surrounding the death of 'Taramee's firstborn would have been an understatement. Pain in his brow finally got his attention, and let him know he'd been frowning too acutely for a little too long, and had worn the expression out. Relaxing it, he opened his eyes again, and let his hand fall from his shoulder, working the fingers of that arm around the pistol grip of the magnum he still held.

Tori probably thought he was paranoid.

She was right.

"_So explain to me why you're following her around, again?_"

Flint sighed, tiredly. Maintaining a state of permanent exhaustion was difficult, even under harsh combat conditions. Doing so without anything to live off of – namely, the adrenalin – was harder still. It was only the utter refusal to face that empty hollow behind his eyelids that kept him awake. There was just no way he'd willingly go there.

Not anymore. "Thor…"

"_I know… I know… shut it._" There was something of an audio roll-eyes-and-look-down accompanying the words.

"I don't know." Flint admitted, finally. "Haven't given it thought."

"_That sounds… blatantly inept. Have you not considered the fact that you're offering a potential enemy the position of teammate? Have you a death wish?_" Thor hesitated for a moment, then made a sighing sound. "_Scratch that. We both know the answer to that one already. Allow me to rephrase._"

"Don't bother." Flint grumbled, wishing he'd left it at 'shut it'. His eyebrows shot upwards, though, when he saw Tori come back out of the room she'd gone into.

"_Is that a…?_" Thor stammered, just as shocked.

"A _cat_?" Flint asked, unsure how to feel about that. Tactical evasion and retreat for the sake of a _cat_?? His gaze flicked up from the little tabby shorthair to Tori's face, the animal tucked about as securely into her arms as such a thing could be. It looked as if there was nothing going to separate her from it… and even though he really didn't remember the last time he'd seen such a creature, he felt no inclination to savor the reintroduction of something other than sentient hostile beings to his environment.

"Shut up." Tori told him, stepping out past him and going around, back up the hall the way they'd come.

"_Was she talking to you or me, just then?_" Thor wondered.

"Pick one." Flint grumbled, pulling himself off the wall. Though the admission to the AI earlier had been true, now he was sparing time to think about the wisdom of following Tori around. Especially if she was going to be going on little-animal rescues around the asteroid…

The ponderous line of reasoning did serve as a good distraction from the sizzled edges of his instincts, and he got nearly halfway back up the same corridors before he remembered to look for company down any of the junctures they passed. Spooked by the sudden ghosting of a shadow flickering at the opposite end of one such hall, he froze there, facing it.

He blinked; when the gun had come up was a mystery even to him, but he suspected it had happened within the same momentary flinch that had brought him to a stop, and gotten him turned to the right. Sparing a moment to assess his position, situation, and surroundings, he shifted slightly to better balance against the magnum's kickback. Forgetting about Tori for a moment, he took a step forward in the new direction, the telling buzz of suggestion crinkling the edges of perception. There was something real down there, something he _knew_ he'd seen.

Everything was stark as day – the cramp in his shoulder, the feel of his tongue against his teeth, the texture of the grip on the magnum through his Mjolnir gloves, even the subtle shifting of the way the armor slid over his skin as he walked in it. Weight transfer was given as much attention as what his eyes could see.

Reaching the next connecting juncture, he checked right first, turning fast all the way around before looking left, offering neither direction more than a heartbeat's neglect. Only a planned ambush would have countered the attention sweep. Flint stood there in the juncture for several eon-long seconds, unsure of which way to go to effectively follow that passing shadow.

Finally, exhaling, he let the aim of his magnum sag, and turned his head without following it with the barrel. "_Right._" Thor offered, helpfully. It only took as much time for him to turn fully in that direction before Flint was again in motion, hauling fast and stealthy up the corridor that had at first been left when he'd approached it, but was now to his right. As he extended his foot for the first step, the magnum came back up. Ahead, somewhere, verified if the AI could see it.

A half dozen yards from the juncture the corridor bent without connection, and elevated slightly in a shallow ramp that stopped going up after about fifty feet. It was only roughly six feet above where he'd been when at the bottom of the ramp, but again, it was enough to obscure the end of the corridor. Reaching the top, at the very farthest end, where he could see the shaded indentation indicating a crossways passage juncture and a quadrant seal, he finally caught sight of what he'd followed.

As he made the final step and raised the magnum to line up the sights, the man at the end of the hallway turned around, to look back at him. Eyes as black as night blinked once, then the whole person ducked fast first down then to the side, heading right in a dive. Half a heartbeat later, the sound of his voice reached Flint past the first discharged round.

"_Fuck!_"

The round struck the quadrant seal, the heavily armored door singing a loud note as the round struck home and burrowed in. Lurching into a run, Flint charged up the hall, hitting the corner with one hand on it and swung around it to pursue the sound of quickened steps ahead of him. Catching a sightline again around another junctured corner, he jerked the magnum up and popped off another shot that kept the man from going right. Instead, he ducked left, tumbling nearly over himself around the corner.

But rather than keep going, he rolled his hips around, slammed a shoulder into that wall, leaned his arms and head around the corner he'd just turned, and leveled a standard MA5C back down the hall at Flint.

"Cease fucking fire, dammit! Friendly! You hear me? _Friendly_!!" He yelled.

Flint cupped his other hand under the magnum's butt, slowing to a walk. Should he trust that? Details swam, obscuring most but not all. Breath came ragged and fast. Swatches of dark green and dun brown mixed around the man's arms and head, the yellow square over his left eye not attached to a helmet. But he didn't look right.

Flint tried to blink the fuzz out of his eyes, but all that did was smear it worse. Dizziness surged across to the left, seeking to unbalance him, but though he felt the gravity shift, for once he didn't try to compensate. Slowing to a stop at last, the man's head lined up with the front sight, Flint contemplated what he was looking at.

He ducked back around the corner, but the barrel-end of that MA series rifle remained exposed around the corner, displaying that he'd not gone anywhere, but merely taken his head out of the line of fire. "_Shit_… mother fucker's nuts." Around the corner, he waved a hand twice, attempting to signal the cease-fire. "Friendly! I'm a Marine, dammit!"

Everywhere, the sound of the air compressors hissing gurgled weirdly, surrounding him with an ominous audio. Cautious, Flint looked around, suddenly untrusting of his surroundings. Was there real Flood in here? Were the distortions in the figure at the corner really real, or just imagined? The magnum didn't waver. Shifting his balance ahead, Flint took another step forward, keeping the handgun ahead of him the whole time. Memory of his introduction to the wretched parasite washed past behind his thoughts, recalling disgust, horror, and the overwhelming sense of being outnumbered.

See a Flood, kill it. They'll do worse to you.

The next time the Marine tipped his head around the corner, testing, Flint shot at it, sending him ducking away again. The motion was accompanied by another oath, and then something mainly unintelligible stammered into the radio. The comn in Flint's helmet crackled as it attempted to reel towards the active line, but failed to get there before the Marine was done talking.

Rifle rounds splashed down the hallway at him, four striking across his chest and shoulder, turning him out and ruining his aim for long enough for the Marine to turn and run for it. Flint spared enough time to be grateful the punishing impacts had happened on his right, rather than his left, then came back around and hauled up the hallway after the escaping Marine.

He wanted that rifle.

When he saw him next, the next round dropped the target. But after tumbling over his own head once and sprawling for a half-second, the Marine just screamed at him, clawed back to his feet, rattled off more of the magazine at him, and ran away again. On the way, Flint heard him yelling into the comn unit on his ear that he was being hunted by a Spartan… something more was included, but he was around another gods-forsaken corner by then and it was too muffled to be intelligible.

So, they'd know he was coming. Flint was rather used to that… but in the case of Flood, it just gave them enough time to amass enough forces to do their swarming thing, and he was in no mood – let alone condition – to handle a whole swarm of Flood forms. God forbid there be more of them than he had bullets for. He only had a magnum, after all!

Catching up to the man proved difficult, but it was more because he kept running a shoulder into the walls when they bent and warped around him, once slapping him aside so hard it drove him to his knees. Whatever kind of anomaly it was, it was slowing him down, and letting the Marine escape. But Flint knew how to stay focused, even past battle injury, so an unstable corridor ought not be such a problem… still, it was a new one. Even for Flint.

Reaching the next point where he spotted his target again, Flint tried to shoot him only to hear the ominous sound of a hammer striking home on an empty chamber. His clip was dry. Damn. Charging ahead as he changed magazines, Flint grumbled to himself about timing. If he'd had a bullet then, he could have dropped the Marine for good just then, but since he'd been dry and hadn't noticed, it let the target escape. Maybe he was slipping… or maybe he hadn't reloaded since the last time he'd fired the gun and had forgotten that the clip hadn't been full, thus throwing off his math.

Yeah… that one sounded more likely.

Coming around the next corridor, Flint found himself in another stretch of laboratories, each one stocked heavily with testing and monitoring equipment. Venturing into the tangled mess, he kicked aside the end of a desk with one powered boot, sending everything atop it crashing spectacularly to the floor in his wake. Reaching the first internal doorway, he heard the comn in his helmet come on.

"_Flint, can you hear me?_" It sounded familiar, but he couldn't really place why. He hadn't really known that many women… and of the ones that he'd worked with, he felt reasonably assured that he'd not seen any of their small number in a couple of decades. So who was this? "_Come on, answer me. I know there's a comn in your helmet, so say something, dammit._"

Flint growled. "Shut up."

"_Oh no, you did _not_ just tell me to shut up!_" She shrieked, right into his ear.

He flinched away from the sound, even though it was inside his helmet and the comn speaker bud only followed his motion. "Agh!"

"_Where are you? What are you doing? I'm hearing comn chatter from the pilot and his friend. Are you _shooting_ at them, Flint?_"

"Shut up! Shut up! I don't have time for this!" Flint smacked himself in the helmet a few times blindly before finally finding the comn switch, and getting it to switch off. That done, he punched another bothersome desk aside and charged through the splintering mess it became to get through the next three rooms and out back into more corridor. There, he saw a small splattering of blood droplets on the floor, indicating he was on the right track. "Got you." Turning to follow their trail, he jacked the slide on the magnum, catching the unspent round as it spun upwards through the air in his free hand.

That round would come in handy later, but for now it assured him there was one in the chamber, without a doubt. Reaching the first juncture, he heard the comn switch back online.

"_Come on, Flint… what's wrong with you? I thought we were friends._" The voice complained.

"I have no idea who the hell you think you are, then." Flint answered, making a corner he only knew he needed to make because of the bloody handprint on the wall at waist-height. "Stay the hell of my comn. I'm working." Reaching up, he flicked it back off, but he felt it shift under his fingers as it clicked right back on again.

"_Do _not_ make me come down there and get your ass, Flint. Trust me… we need to go, and I'm the one sitting inside the ship we're going to use to do that with. Come down to the shuttle bay."_ She sounded like a Colonel, or worse… but of authority, she definitely thought she had. Enough, perhaps, to try to command him around.

Flint wanted nothing of it… there were _Flood_ in these corridors, after all! But gods, how deep did they go? And how had he gotten into them? Was it some kind of demented mountain complex? It had that underground feel to it, for sure. Even though he'd not seen a single rock or indication that there was stone behind the steel corridors, there just wasn't anything to make it feel like a ship. Of any kind. He didn't answer, simply smacking the comn switch again… and then again… and then giving up on it when it seemed insistently intent on staying online. Oh well, he could try to work around being screamed at the whole way.

It wasn't as if he hadn't done _that_ before…

"_Flint… come down to the shuttle bay._"

"Not gonna happen." Flint grumbled, finally catching sight of his prey at last and firing off three rounds before the hapless Marine fell over. He bawled when he hit, clawing at the floor with a fervency wrought of desperation. He'd never really seen a Flood form act like that before, but he'd never seen the kind that ran away, either. Maybe there were more kinds of Flood than he'd ever manage to see in his lifetime, but it didn't matter. Flood was Flood was Flood, and all of them needed to be neutralized. He didn't stop running, though, certain he'd only nicked the thing, and needed to get closer now it was prone and pop the controlling pod embedded in the exoform's chest cavity.

That's how Flood worked, that's how Flood died. And if he turned the exoform to soup, the part that made it a Flood form would still remain. So he had to get closer, to ensure the controlling pod was destroyed.

It rolled over, huffing in agony, and seated the MA series in an armpit before firing the whole clip at him. Rounds zinged off his armor, pounding hard and stalling out his advance. The last six struck him backwards, leaving him off his balance long enough for the Flood to reload. It was a fast reload… like a long-practiced motion. A primal scream came out with the entirety of the next magazine, each bullet striking like a fist to the guts.

Flint doubled under the last two rounds, missing their punishment but failing to need it as he sagged against the wall, beaten and sure he must have taken a breaching round _somewhere_… even though he couldn't feel it yet. "Dammit," he gasped, groping after the magnum that he'd dropped. It looked a mile away, even as much as he reached for it. "C'mere, you…"

He'd only just managed to get his fingers around the barrel and pull it inward when he heard the scraping sound of a body getting up. There was no time to get the gun properly in hand, let alone aimed, before the Marine had gotten himself drug around a corner, out of the sightline, and from there, he could be heard to stagger on away up the hall. Every huffing step was an obvious effort, but it seemed worth the try to the guy.

Gathering his wits, Flint peeled his own carcass off the floor, and pried it from the wall once upright.

"_You're going to get yourself killed, Flint. You need to come back to the shuttle bay._" The woman in his ear was saying.

"No, there's Flood." Flint protested, lurching for that corner. It was only a few feet, but it seemed a world away. Reaching it, he hit the wall with a shoulder and stayed on it, looking up the length at the retreating back of the Marine. "I can't let them get away…"

"_Flint, you need to trust me. You have to let them go. Come back to the shuttle bay._"

Twisting around to see him leaning there, the fellow grabbed at his rifle for a second before getting it up and pointed at Flint. The realization of the threat renewed in his brain, and he came off the corner fast enough that the rounds sent there missed him, but the rounds he sent back likewise missed due to poor pre-jerk planning. Still, the Marine ducked anyway, knocking his own precarious, wounded balance off kilter and sending him back to the floor in a heap.

"_Flint, please. Just let them go… it's time to leave, they don't matter. You don't need to kill them. Just trust me._"

The Marine kicked at the floor for a moment, but decided to reload and empty the clip at Flint again instead of getting up when the Spartan stepped closer. It didn't seem to matter anymore that the magnum was empty, or that the Mjolnir had finally broken again, and the crystalline gel layer was oozing out with trickles of blood that looked a sickly brown.

Flint dropped to his knees almost two feet from the downed Marine, staring at him through the tinted visor like he'd done something impossible. Sagging sideways, his armored bulk struck the floor with a shuddering thud, but once down, he stayed there.

Wheezing in both pain and terror, the Marine kept the empty rifle pointed at him, staring at him intently. If he dared move even a little, the trigger would get depressed again. Finally, the moment of tension passed, and he rolled onto an elbow, dropping out the empty magazine and slamming in a new one. Once it was in, he yanked on the action bar and released it at the back so it slammed forward with as much force as the spring lock owned. Looking up past the gun at the Spartan, the Marine spared the fallen hulk a puzzled look. What had caused him to attack a fellow human? What had made him snap that way? Spartans were, without fail, showcased as the vanguard of everything humanity was. They were the proverbial white knights that swooped in to save the day where the Marine forces got hammered flat. But there before him lay one such hero, dragged to a stop from killing his own only at the behest of three magazines of human-made bullets.

That there was something wrong with that picture was to make an understatement.

Gasping in some air, the Marine let the rifle rest against the floor where it had fallen while he reloaded it and chambered a new round. Satisfied that the Spartan wouldn't try to get back up again at least for a short while, he stuck his fingers down into the broken, perforated body armor he wore, searching for real wounds and trying to determine how many of the hits had actually struck flesh.

Four had. One was through the meat of his left thigh, but it was an exterior thigh wound, rather than being close to the femoral artery, and the swelling had already cut off the bleeding. That did nothing for the pain, though, and he tugged out his sadly small personal medical kit to try to dress each of them.

He had just peeled back the armor and web gear belting from the last of the four to address the hole punched into his carcass when motion caught his eye, and raised his gaze to the Spartan. The Marine watched as he pulled in an arm, at first slowly, then a little faster. The moment after accomplishing that move, he raised that hand, and let it spread on the side of his helmet, where it stayed for a long, long time.

The Marine tasted his lips, sparing a look around. If the Spartan got back up, and attacked some more, the odds of his escaping the incident with his life again were pretty dismal. Sucking up his courage, he raised his rifle, and dragged himself closer. Propping a boot against the Spartan's arm, he pushed it back against his armor-plated chest, and held it there. With the barrel of his rifle resting against the floor, he reached past it and tugged on what he hoped were the latches that maintained the seal integrity of the helmet's throat.

One popped up easier than the other, but he kept tugging until it lifted free. The hiss of light decompression – of canned air escaping, mainly – told the Marine that the helmet was loose, so he wrapped both hands around it and pulled sideways to make it lift free. Once it was off, he let go, and it rolled over upside down to settle on the sunshades over the visor. Resting his hands around the grips on his MA5C, the Marine leaned back on an elbow to look at what he'd revealed.

"Did you kill it?" Flint asked, weakly.

"Kill what?" The Marine asked, his brown eyebrows meeting in startlement. "You shot _me_."

Flint's gaze rolled past his head, and looked over the rifle for a moment. From the look on his face, it wouldn't have been hard to guess he wasn't fully in touch with the environment around him anymore. "Sorry."

"Sorry? _Sorry_? Man, you _shot_ my ass! You shot me full of goddamn holes!" The Marine protested, feeling slighted by the apology. "You _chased me down_ to do it, too!"

"I thought I was… following the Flood." Flint mumbled, sounding speculative. Rolling his eyes to the side, he tried to focus on the floor that was just beyond that temple, but gave up on it after a glance, and looked back up at the Marine.

Horror had spread over the man's honey features, but Flint couldn't see any of his details anymore. The eyes and eyebrows had blended together into one dark blur across the top of his face, and the lower half just wiggled a little whenever he opened his mouth to speak. "There's _Flood_ in here??" He squeaked. "How many? Where? Did you kill them all? Is that why you're here? How did Flood make it to this place?"

Flint just frowned at him. From somewhere in the back of his mind, he remembered something about a shuttle bay… was that supposed to be a destination point? Considering the immediate surroundings, it seemed a likely bet. "You… know where the… um." What was it called, again? Something-bay. But there were a dizzying amount of different uses for a 'bay', so just asking where the bay was wouldn't earn him anything useful.

"Where?" The Marine asked, a little calmer. He shook his head. "No, man… my ass is lost. I haven't got a clue where I am. I was just concentrating on running away from _you_."

Flint grunted. That was always good news. But while his whole body ached, and in some places more than others, he knew he was used to that. Some pain never went away. Like the cramping ache welling in the shoulder he was laying on. He knew he hadn't been shot through it, so it had to be the old injury agitating again. Thought in that direction spiraled until the topic was nolonger relevant, and he only focused on the Marine again when the man moved. For the lapse, he got smacked on the side of the head.

"Hey, you still in there? Come on, say something. I don't wanna go down in history as the guy who killed a Spartan." The Marine said.

Flint groaned, but he rolled his other shoulder backwards, and jerked that arm out from between his chest and the Marine's boot. The action earned him a rifle barrel in the face, but all he did was spread that hand on the floor, and gather up his legs to try to sit up. That was how one got stood, right? Sit up first. Rising made the world spin madly, wildly, but once all the way sat up, it slowed a little so he knew the Marine hadn't moved yet. He still sat there in the same place in the same way, the MA series tucked into one arm, the other supporting him off the floor.

Ahead, as he got a knee pulled up underneath him, he saw a familiar object. Recognizing it as the helmet he'd been wearing a moment ago, he shifted forward to reach for it instead of immediately shifting to get up. Holding that in his left hand – because that whole arm felt numb and was stabbing him in the neck with needles as thick as his fingers – Flint pushed with the right one to get back to his feet.

The world at eyelevel was terribly distorted, and gravity slung in a parabolic arc around his head once before settling as down, causing him to waver once up. Supposing himself in no immediate danger, the Marine stood his rifle against the floor, and gathered his own legs beneath him. "Where were you wanting to be, anyway?"

Flint looked into the dark hollow of his helmet curiously. With his head inside that, he'd known the answer to that. Outside of it, he felt cold, and disoriented. Lifting the helmet, he slid it over his head, and shifted it back and forth until he felt it set and click down. Finding locking catches on either side of his chin, he pulled them back. Pressure tugged at the skin on his face for a fraction of a second, then he felt sealed in. That was good.

"_You're bleeding internally again._" Thor's voice served as a wakening jolt from the numbing stupor of a moment before, but the starkness of the separation between the two versions of perception nearly unbalanced him all over again.

On the outside, half propped on the wall and half leaning on his gun as a crutch, the Marine reached out and grabbed the Spartan by an arm. "Hey, you fall over, I ain't dragging your ass up."

"Shuttle… bay." The thought felt disjointed, but it was there. "Need to find the shuttle bay." But where was that?

"_Proceed ahead._" Thor helped.

"Dude, if you whack out on me one more time, I'm putting you down, fame or no fame." The Marine said, shaking his head. "I ain't got no idea where the hell that is from here. I told you – I'm _lost_."

"_First right, then the following left and three junctures up. I'll guide you from there._"

Flint wasn't sure where those obscure directions would take him, but they sounded sincere and assured… maybe Thor really did know how to get him to the fabled 'shuttle bay' that he felt he needed to find. Either way… it was time to go.


	12. Realizing A Need

**12: REALIZING A NEED**

Tori was standing at the top of the entrance ramp into the Longsword when the airlock opened and Flint came through. She wasn't sure where he'd gotten that rifle, as she'd been pretty sure that unless someone had buried it in an obscure location behind a random wall panel, there were no such guns on the asteroid.

But then again, maybe he'd actually tracked down those poor unfortunate people come in the Longsword and gotten it off one of them. She sighed. But he was there, finally, and while he seemed to be dragging just a bit, he was at least not pointing anything volatile at her. He made the foot of the ramp, and looked down at it for a second. Tori wasn't sure what that hesitation meant, but shortly enough he raised his head and stepped up across the ramp heading in.

He paused again, though, at the top, and looked over at her. When she looked back, he looked away, stepping in past her and walking away into the depths of the Longsword. Shaking her head, Tori touched the hatch control and turned away from it as the ramp began to rise. Nobody came behind Flint, so either he'd killed them, or he'd run them deep enough into the asteroid to get them lost… but either way they weren't coming.

At the fore of the craft, she found him already seated at the pilot's helm, the helmet perched off to one side, covering an obscure control board that at the moment was okay to be covered over. The odds of their needing to shoot their way out were pretty small, so the keys to unsheathe and bring up the guns of the bird could stay covered. Given what she'd seen of Flint outside the cell in Quarantine, that was probably a good thing.

Let the guns stay covered and out of sight.

He looked up when she sat down in the copilot's seat, but ahead only; it was almost as if he wasn't really certain she was even there, despite how she knew he could see her easily enough. Looking at the controls arrayed before her, she frowned. Having never been off the asteroid, the learned skill of piloting anything she came in contact with had faded badly; but looking over at Flint, he seemed to have it all well in hand.

She felt it when the Longsword shifted across the landing pad it had perched upon, and when the struts finally left the floor. Through the blast glass forming the canopy over her head, she could see the iris doors of the bay opening, and when they were roughly halfway there, the bird began to ascend towards them. By the time they had separated to roughly Longsword-size, Flint slipped the bomber through, and they were out.

Out, Tori realized with a sudden wave of terrifying agoraphobia, for the first time in thirty-three years. She folded her arms over her chest, trying to keep her face expressionless in case Flint saw the motion and realized she was now almost as twitchy as he was… there was nothing quite like being cooped in an asteroid for three decades without ever leaving it to make one content with small, cramped spaces. The idea that there was nothing between her and the vast expanse of space anymore but a single thin – relatively – layer of ship's hull was a frightening one. There was no great layer of crustaceous asteroid over the metal, forming a micro-meteorite shield that would as soon get added to as be flaked away, and the lack of depth to her environment's armor made her feel naked and exposed.

Anything could come through that blast glass at a moment's notice, and the instant that it did, she would be a dead woman. The fact that explosive decompression was not instant, nor was immediate exposure to vacuum, passed over her usually scientifically logical brain without note. All that really mattered was the end result. Tori, dead.

Tori did not feel ready to die. Looking over at the ragged visage of Flint, she felt she could reasonably assume he was more or less of the same mind. Else, she imagined, he might well have taken that magnum he'd been so happy to use on all her friends and swallow the damn thing.

Soldiers did that all the time, she'd heard. Ate their own guns, ostensibly for the purpose of making the war raging in their heads stop… going home away from the danger and away from the actual fighting did nothing to solve their PTSD. This one, though, looked more beaten and more ragged the more time went by, but she knew there had to be more to it than just a survival instinct to have pulled through five months of torturous Flood treatment.

More, to have the gumption, the will, and the strength left at the end of that time to tear his way out of containment, and leave. Maybe he knew just how futile Tam's task had been, and when the benefit of the doubt was expired and gone, he became unwilling to take any more. She knew all about the way he'd spike every bio reading known to man and then come flying awake as if he'd just been shot. And she suspected that the reason behind those reactions was why he was so hard to put down, so hard to make rest. There was something behind his eyelids that he couldn't handle, couldn't bear to face.

Oddly, she'd found that if she made the effort to bridge the communication gap created by his almost total silence, it would seem to take the edge off that unsavory nightmare. It had shown in the fluctuation of Tam's moods at the end of each workday. If Flint was in a foul mood, he'd take it out on the science team assigned his case. If he wasn't, then the grumpiness that followed Tam out at day's end was usually significantly less. He'd only complain about a lack of biological progress, rather than 'that goddamned Spartan'.

Flint was not unreasonable. He was just hard to reach. There could be any number of reasons behind that, but it was a fact about him. Why he'd taken to her only raised more questions. Was it because she'd once been a member of his creed? Or was it because she had gone to see him based on her social curiosity, rather than scientific interest?

"Where are we going to go?" Tori asked, eventually, figuring since she hadn't been outside the asteroid in so long, the destination was likely best selected by him. As the view of stars spun gently towards the right, she saw a black silhouette framed by the stars in the background, and peered at it. By the time the shape passed the third support bar in the clear canopy, she knew what it was.

The Longsword's point of origin – a Halcyon-class UNSC cruiser.

Pointing at it, she asked, "There?"

Flint just shook his head.

Tori looked over at him, watching out of the corner of her eye as the cruiser vanished past his edge of the window, and was gone from view. She got the impression he knew full well she was looking at him, but beyond that, he seemed inert to his environment. It was as if he had said all he'd wanted to and would say no more until he absolutely had to. Tori, for her part, was not entirely satisfied with that. "Where?"

Flint reached past the main control stick and adjusted something that she couldn't even begin to recall the meaning of. A guess suggested something about fuel injection, or maybe it was a control circuit for a scanning instrument, and he was navigating. He still didn't answer.

"Flint." Tori pressed.

"I don't care, Tori." He said, finally speaking up. He sounded a little hoarse, but he spoke softly, so it wasn't obvious. "But I am not returning the bird to point of origin… they'll want to know where we came from and where their people are."

"Where are their people, Flint?" Tori asked, half expecting more silence, and half expecting him to give her a cryptic answer.

"The asteroid." That earned her a quizzical glance, though. "Where did you think they were?"

Tori frowned. Perhaps she ought to try to add a bit more existential implication to her query, to get the desired answer out of him. Then again, maybe it wasn't so wise to press about what he did for a living… kill everything in sight and then leave to find more things to kill. At least he wasn't intending to go to the cruiser and clean it out, deck by deck, too.

One catastrophic loss of base personnel was enough for one day.

"Did you shoot them?" She asked.

"Shot at them." Flint muttered, his gaze on the control board again, one hand poking at controls while the other stayed wrapped around a joystick. There were two of them, but which was pitch and which was yaw was a mystery to her. "One of them, anyway."

Tori quirked a brow. "You mean to say they're still alive?"

Flint looked out the canopy for a moment, heaved a tired sounding sigh, and then looked over at her. "They were Marines, Tori… why would I kill Marines?"

Dropping both brows, she crossed her arms. "And what about the Flood I heard you mention?"

He just shook his head. "They've got guns on them… and it's a small asteroid. They can handle whatever's left."

_They can handle whatever's left_. Was he delusional? Even an active hazing of Flood spores would never create any active Flood forms, of any type or kind. And that was all the Flood evidence the asteroid owned! But, at least, he wasn't entirely beyond hope, and perhaps the one that he had shot at had got him straightened out before he swept through and killed Tori, too.

She tightened her grip on her own arms, squeezing until she felt she might bruise her own skin with the crush. Inwardly, though, she didn't really care – she knew she'd unleashed something frightful, and she'd lost everyone she'd ever known because she hadn't taken him down when she'd had the chance.

Tori turned her head away, seeking some solitude, some comfort, in the cold, broad expanse of the stars twinkling beyond the side windows along the flanks of the bird. There, she found neither, but rather felt only more lost, more alone, and more trapped. Grief for the loss of her friends welled in a deepening pit in her stomach, but any tears let out now would only entice a reaction from her companion, and while she'd come to appreciate bits and pieces of him, she knew as a whole, she had a lot more to learn about him before she could really trust him… or even know him.

Flint was a walking enigma. A walking enigma with a gun, to be precise. One that shot down and killed living beings, people, and with efficiency.

Flint stayed where he was, as he was, staring for the most part at the equipment before him, even when Tori finally stood up almost an hour later. He watched her leave in his peripheral, but going over the motions aloud inside his head kept his focus off the wrenching pain in his side and middle, where the Marine's bullets had gone through. Most of the seepage had been wiped off before he'd gotten to the airlock, and anything coming out of him now was contained within the armor, where it would not be seen until much later.

He didn't mind.

But while most of the dizziness was gone now he'd finally sat down, he still felt sick, and now weak, added to the new aches granted by being shot several times. The one fortunate part he felt at the moment was that his bum shoulder wasn't acting up, and he almost couldn't feel it. There was always something coming from that shoulder – a pulling, a pinching, sometimes it would seize up and most of the time when it seized it would also cramp… mostly it just plain hurt, throbbing like a second heart. At the moment, all he felt out of it was the tightness of having not quite enough scar tissue over the area to cover the whole thing effectively, and still leave the joint limber and mobile. But tightness he could deal with. It was bleeding to death he wasn't fond of… and Thor had sounded pretty certain he had some internal issues going.

That had been one hell of a Marine.

He settled back in the pilot's seat, wondering at the thing. The last seat he'd found in a Longsword had not been quite this comfortable… but then again, maybe it was his armor creating the effect, and the chair wasn't any different than standard issue. Briefly he considered pulling Thor out of the helmet to his left and finding a jack he'd fit into somewhere on the control board, but dismissed the idea a moment later.

Thor could probably use the chill time.

Flint punched in a course the autopilot could think about for a while, and locked in the controls, before dropping both hands into his lap and closing his eyes. Resting them felt good, but he kept close tabs on the sounds of the Longsword around him just to be sure he didn't accidentally fall asleep.

It did not, he discovered shortly, work quite as well as he'd hoped. The sound was weird, drawling, and distorted at first, but impact into his bad shoulder sent a frozen spike into his throat, jerking him fully awake. The sound clarified into the ping of comn contact, the channel open at the other end and hailing at his.

Squinting, he turned his head, to find Tori standing there. Well, that explained why he'd been hit… but it didn't explain much else. Reaching forward, he flipped on the comn.

"_Unknown, please identify or you will be fired upon._"

Flint grunted. "Helmsmen."

"They fell out of slipspace about a minute ago." Tori said. "I heard the ping, but I didn't want to answer it because I have no idea what to tell them."

Flint looked at her, as she sat back down in the copilot's chair. "You heard the ping?"

Tori nodded. "You were ignoring it… you were apparently asleep, though."

He lifted a hand, and worked the ache out of his brow with those fingers. Feeling the rough exterior of Mjolnir gloves – gripping ridges, mainly – on his bare forehead hurt more than the kneading helped, so he left it at one push and dropped his hand again.

"_Unknown Longsword craft, this is the UNSC _Nine Lives,_ please respond._"

Flint sighed. "Give him another couple of seconds, and he'll think we're derelict."

"You really want to risk that, given that the _last _thing he said mentioned something about shooting at us?" Tori asked, tilting her head at him.

He contemplated her expression for a moment, trying to figure out what it meant, before turning away with a bob of his eyebrows – he'd figure it out later – and hit the comn control with a finger. "This is Longsword craft responding to the _Nine Lives_, over."

"_Damn, I thought you were empty for a second there._"

Flint cast Tori a what'd-I-tell-ya look that made her grin. "Negative on that, _Nine Lives_, we've a capacity of two."

"_State your vector and berth, I don't see any other vessels out here. You guys adrift or just lost?_" The _Nine Lives_ helmsman asked.

Flint thought about that for a second, then poked the button again, and said, "No vector especial. And I borrowed the bird… no idea what her berth is either."

Tori cast him a worried look, and her expectation came through loud and clear; "_Ah, I'm gonna have to see an ID number, there, mister. UNSC property isn't for the borrowing._"

She watched as Flint punched something into the console ahead of him, then sit back and wait again. "What was that?" she asked.

Flint didn't answer. "_Are you shitting me?_" The _Nine Lives_ helmsman gawked. "_Who's your friend?_"

He looked at her, then. With a finger on the button, he answered, "One-three-eight."

"_Alright, if you say so. Cap'm wants you two to come aboard. I'd be hoping I'm seven feet or taller right now if I was you, because he doesn't really look convinced._" The helmsman said. _"I'll open a bay off the port for you, swing on over. You do have operational drives, right?_"

"Copy that." Flint said, his tone deadpan as his fingers moved over the control board, disengaging the autopilot. "I don't suppose you've any ID on you, do you?"

Tori squeaked at him. "What is that supposed to mean?"

He shrugged. "I don't have any more Mjolnir than what's on me, Tori, and it's either Mjolnir or an ID with these guys." He looked up at her. "You do know you're a division of ONI, right?"

Tori sighed. "I'm a scientist. I… _was_ a scientist. For the last three decades. I wouldn't know what to do with a suit like that one if it was given to me, Flint. I haven't killed anything in a long, long time."

He grunted. "Well…" but he left it hanging at that, somehow failing to finish the sentence as the Frigate's bay appeared almost suddenly around the nose of the Longsword and swallowed around them. Lights flooded the cockpit from outside the ship, shining bright and harsh from within the bay.

Tori held onto her seat until after Flint had set the bird down and got it started winding down the engines. Every bit of her insides were twisting around, and her throat felt tight. But she felt sure she could manage to pass as whatever she needed to be once her feet hit the deck of the _Nine Lives_… she had no real intention of trying to be a Spartan for the crew, after all… when it came right down to it, she had long ago forgotten how.

All that hero bullshit was Flint's job, as far as she was concerned. She swallowed as a rush of air smelling like coolant and lubricant washed up from behind her. "Door's open." Flint said, pushing away from the controls and standing up. Looking over, she thought he put a little too much effort into that, the point made when he kept a hand on the back of the pilot's chair for longer than it took him to get turned around and facing away.

Thinking her knees felt uncharacteristically wobbly, Tori stood up after him, and set about to follow. The smell of the fighter bay was absolutely sickening the closer she got to it, making her hesitant to step forward, and wishing Flint would at least lend her the helmet, even if he kept the body's half of the suit. She watched him walk up to the descending ramp with the thing tucked under an elbow, that hand hung limp like the weight of his arm was sufficient to keep it propped against his hip.

Flint watched as the lip of the ramp as it lowered until he could see the faces of the men – most of whom looked like bridge officers – gathered on the floor looking back. He saw several of their eyebrows rise, but only one said anything; "Welcome to the _Nine Lives_, zero-nine-three."

"Chief." He answered.

The officer hesitated, then inclined his head. "Chief, then." His gaze flicked over to where Tori had stepped up, and his expression dampened from slight enthusiasm to puzzled shock. "I daresay… where did you two come from?"

"Installation, up the galaxy a ways." Flint waved uselessly at the air with his free hand. "You probably wouldn't have heard of it."

"You both look like death." The officer blurted. "And she looks…"

Instinct screamed that he ought to turn around and out, and if he had a gun, by god get it up and aimed in that direction… but logic overrode at the very last minute, and when he turned to look, instead the helmet hit the deck and rolled down to greet the officers when he lurched forward to catch Tori as she dropped.

Balancing against her suddenly limp weight, Flint got her rolled in his grasp so he could see her face. There was a light sheen of sweat glistening on her chocolate skin, and even from the distance of arm's length he could tell her breath was shallow. "Tori?" he asked, uncertain why she would have just spontaneously dropped like that. "Tori? Tori!" He shook her, but she didn't answer. "Ah, crap." Dipping a hand under her knees, he lifted her off the decking, and stepped down the ramp towards the officers. "Out of the goddamn way – which way's the med bay?"

All of them dispersed, two of them pointing as they did so, so he went that direction. Following him, one spared the moment to stoop and pick up the helmet. All the way up the corridors to the destination in question, Tori never stirred, pretending for all she was worth to have just died, for no apparent cause. Going through the door, Flint found he had to not only duck but step through sideways, made necessary by Tori's crosswise length and his own height, but the instant he was inside, three medical officers appeared out of nowhere and beelined for him.

"What happened?" one asked.

"Who is she?" another asked. "Put her here… what do you know about her medical history?"

"Uh… nothing." Flint admitted, spreading Tori on the indicated examination table. He stepped back nearly atop one of them, but he didn't miss it when the first one to touch her recoiled hissing and waving that hand as if he'd just scalded it. If the sweat was sign of a fever, and if the fever was that hot, it was a very bad thing indeed.

"She's sick?" One of the officers asked, standing just behind where Flint had come to a stop. "What exactly was going on in this installation you came from?"

"You don't want to know." Flint said, beginning to suspect what might have just happened… maybe it was her own unique reaction to Flood contamination? Would the others aboard the _Nine Lives_ soon succumb and show their own symptoms? He started to back away from the gathered people, feeling like a ticking time bomb. At any moment, he'd detonate, and all of them would be dead… and it would have been his fault.

"The hell I don't." The officer said, turning to follow Flint's backwards retreat with his accusing gaze. "What's wrong with her?"

"Catastrophic immune failure." One of the medics said, over a device he was holding over Tori. "Walker, get fifty cc's of metahydrazine and one of faradrylazide and get them in an IV _right now_."

One of the attending medics ran for it.

"Hey!" The officer talking to Flint protested, grabbing his attention again. "Are you even listening to me?" He hesitated when he received the look the Spartan gave him, though, and slowly raised a hand to wave it back and forth in front of Flint's face. "…hello?"

One foot went behind the other, small steps at first, then slightly longer ones. He needed to escape this… to get away, to get clear, before it was too late. But when the exit he'd come in through appeared in his peripheral, and he went for it, he didn't strike the hole quite square. Striking his bum shoulder across the edge of the doorway, the Mjolnir dented the steel frame even as the joint was jerked backwards, sending knives anew all up his neck and down through his chest and causing him to grab for the shoulder with his other hand. The offset in balance saw him against the wall on the far side of the corridor, grimacing for the pain.

There, his knees buckled, and he sank to the floor, hissing through clenched teeth. Lights flashed that weren't attached to the ceiling, and shadows crept in from the edges that had no casters. Still, he couldn't get his fingers through the Mjolnir plating over that shoulder, couldn't make the pain quit.

"Good god…" he wasn't sure where that comment came from, but it sounded like the officer from a moment before. "The both of you are falling apart at the seams."

Turning from the newly dented doorway, the officer looked back at where Tori had been lain. Catching the eye of one of the medics, he cocked an inquisitive brow. "Well?"

The medic shrugged. "It's like I said, sir… it's the weirdest thing I've ever done seen. I'll say this – she's definitely Spartan. There's carbon fiber on her bones and her muscle tissue is roughly five times denser than yours. But the getter is this, sir… she simply doesn't _have_ an immune system."

Shocked, the officer could do little more than show it. "Holy hell. How'd she get this far?"

"My guess is some kind of booster medication and some very fine biological isolation for a very, very long time." The medic cleared his throat, and then added, "there's more."

The officer stared openly at the medic. "How can there be _more_??"

The query earned him a feral grin. "There's a foreign substance in her bloodstream that doesn't match anything I have on file. It looks like an aggressive contaminant of some kind… but it's damn near inert, and there are some of the cells we pulled out that simply don't adhere to _anything_ we expose it to. Someone managed to find a way to immunize her against everything temporarily, fortifying her cellular structure against her environment… but it's worn off now. The effects are all but gone, and if we can't get her to come around in the next hour or so… she'll die, sir."

The officer rubbed a hand over his mouth, awed. "What about that one?" he asked, gesturing loosely through the – was it permanently open now? Might be – doorway into the hall at the other Spartan, crumpled there against the wall.

Seeing that, the medic just heaved a dejected sigh. "Him _too_?" he groaned.

"Apparently so." The officer shook his head, half bemused and half unable to figure what to think. "Get him in here, and get me some answers. And if you can get them to tell you what they got into, in that… installation… then all the better. I should return to the bridge."

The medic just nodded. "Okay, yes, sir. I'll do my best."

"And call some help if you need it." The officer added, stepping out the door that had yet to close, and past the Spartan before heading up the hallway.

Looking at Flint, the medic heaved another sigh. "Alright, then, you can't stay down there." Stepping out into the hallway, he reached for an arm. Tugging on it without even being able to lift the appendage, he added, "Come on, I can't lift your heavy carcass. Get up, come on. Captain's orders."

The grimace had faded into a pained frown, but he did pull himself back up, and return to the medical bay. There, he let them strip him out of the Mjolnir, setting the armor aside for what felt like the hundredth time. He felt sad to see it go, but it stayed in sight this time – although he got to see some of the most horrified shocked looks he'd ever seen in his life when the one fellow drew a blood sample, and it was brown.

"Good god! What kind of disease do _you_ have??"

Flint just shook his head. No… they didn't want to know. They'd understand that once they finally did find out. But when they discovered the bulletholes, it was all chaos and heyday all over again. It was very shortly after that that they also discovered that no amount of anesthetic or sedative had any kind of effect on him… but rather than conking him on the head with something big and heavy, the head medic pulled a different trick; somehow, he got the wounds starved of enough blood that they went numb despite all else.

While it left him awake and paying attention to what he quickly found was not really all that fascinating, it also kept him from needing to feel what it felt like to have a bullet pulled. Looking at himself for what felt like the first time in years, though, he found his skin was damn near a map it was crisscrossed by so many lines and dimples. He looked away more to keep from recalling the tale behind each one, though, than for any resentment of looking scarred. The neat, straight line up one side of his belly was the only one that didn't look jagged and terrifying. It seemed to be the only one he could recall being his own fault, too.

Maybe John had been right, when he'd mentioned a distaste for the energy swords the Elites had favored – that was how he'd earned that mark, after all. Self-application of one such blade, backwards right into his middle. It was a badge earned post-Longsword-crash, the shoulder injury being the whole reason it had happened.

"Ethridge! She's awake." Someone called, distracting Flint's musings. He looked over, a little interested to know what Tori might have to say about her situation. She'd never told him how she hadn't dropped dead as soon as he'd let her out, but it hadn't been standard practice to go around dealing with folk who had no immunities. The sad truth was that he'd forgotten when she'd failed to remind him by dying. Why it had taken her so long to drop was another good question, but when he saw her eyes open, he also saw her frown.

A flashlight in one hand, the medic standing over her hesitated on using it to blind her one eye at a time, waiting more to be sure she was really awake first. "Tori?" he asked. "That is your name, right? Tori?"

She nodded.

"Mine's Daniel Walker. I'm a medic. I don't mean to press you, but there are several questions we need you to answer for us, okay? Can you do that?"

Tasting her lips, Tori looked around, spotting Flint at the far side of the entrance. "Okay… shoot."

"What happened to your immunities, Tori?"

"The augmentation process destroyed them." She answered, studying the way Flint looked without a shirt on. "Oh, damn. It must have worn off, or…"

"Yeah, that was gonna be my next question." Walker interrupted. "What was it you were taking that stabilized your condition for as long as it did?"

Tori inhaled slowly, thinking about that for a moment before smiling softly at Flint.

"Tori? Hello? We can't keep you stable for very long at all, given that most drugs are engineered around existing immunity boosting, and you've nothing to boost. What were you taking?" Walker pressed. "We need to know soon, so that we can try to get some before you die… horribly… from something obscure."

"Blood." She tipped her head in Flint's direction. "It was his."

Across the room, she saw Flint's jaw slack open.


	13. Bring Her Roses

**13: BRING HER ROSES**

There was really no other way to describe the expression on his face; his, more so than the gathered medical staff. _You have got to be shitting me!_ His, perhaps, more than the others because he knew in graphic detail just what was swimming around in his veins at the moment. It existed on the other's faces because the idea that one person's blood was not necessarily a drug to another person's system.

But the shock wore off on the medics first. Flint just sat there staring at her, silent, his gaze slowly dissolving into speculative, puzzled… unsure just what he was really looking at. It gave Tori the impression that he thought she had more such world-shattering secrets that he could never begin to guess at. She only had a few.

In the whirl of motion around her, she could see equipment she recognized – centrifuges, among others – as the medical crew began to try to figure out first why Flint's blood was brown, and second if it was really safe to just set up a siphon between the two Spartans and leave it at that.

It wasn't long at all before they discovered the "odd aggressive contaminant" they'd found in her was the dominant cellular presence in his. Scraping it out of the sample left them with remarkably little actual human blood, making the drawing of a seeming excessive amount a necessity.

Giving the end result to Tori first made her feel weirdly numb, then knocked her cold. The same medication administered ineffectually to Flint had had a much more potent effect on her, it seemed… but after being shot twice and not even sparing time to check out the wounds, let alone dress them, and then sucked dry by the medical team, it wasn't long before Flint dropped out, too.

In his case, it happened when he got tired of humoring them, and tried to stand up to leave… all he got was upright, though, before his system decided that it didn't have enough blood to keep his brain alive anymore, and the result was a blackout. As a result, he hit the floor in a heap, rather than passing out quietly on the table like Tori had. The commotion of first being shouldered off and then watching him drop to the deck had the medics in a tizzy anew, even as they had to assure themselves that they hadn't just killed the other one after the administration of the purified blood.

By the time the staff had any of it cleaned up and squared away, a Marine stepped through the door, a little tabby in his arms.

"Anyone know why there's a cat running helter-skelter up and down the halls down in Maintenance?" The fellow asked, his fingers running up and down the back of the cat's fuzzy head. "Or… how she got aboard the _Nine Lives_?"

* * *

Tori snapped awake faster than she had the mental processes to manage, but her gaze slung over to the far side of the main bay entrance… which was standing oddly open, as if it had been locked that way… to where Flint had been when she'd passed out. A brief self-diagnostic had found her sitting upright, but still on the same gurney as before. Only now… that far side of the bay was freshly abuzz with commotion as Flint's latest awakening brought hell down to the mortal world.

Exhaling the breath she'd been holding, she folded her hands in her lap as she watched them try to figure out what had made him jump to so fast… and with such fervor. They might never figure it out, but she already knew. She was debating calling out to them to just leave him alone, and he'd be fine… debated also whether or not to tell them what was wrong with him.

But what, ultimately, would that earn? The Flood aside, the man was a mess. Fear was something drilled mercilessly out of each and every Spartan, banished and forever removed, taught as a thing that existed only in the minds of those who didn't know any better. To a Spartan, fear was a toy to hand to one's enemies, to disorient, distract, and dishevel them. But that figment of imagination had revisited this one… like an apparition owning its own sentience, its own goals and its own machinations. That it had its clawed hands wrapped securely around him was without doubt.

Otherwise… he wouldn't feel a need to react to his dreams as if he were under attack.

Spotting her sitting up, one of the medics ventured her way. "Hi, there. How do you feel?" It wasn't Walker, but she hadn't seen who had reacted to the name of Ethridge, so she couldn't be sure if she knew his name or not.

"Marginally better, I suppose." Tori admitted, finding her voice scratchy for some reason. Maybe she'd konked out with her mouth hanging open, and her throat had dried out. It didn't taste that way, though. "Less… cold."

The medic nodded. "That's good news… remarkable news, honestly, but good news. You say the augmentation process destroyed your immune system… what kind of augmentation process would do that? It's nearly unheard of, in the medical field."

Tori shrugged. "I don't know what happened, or what went wrong. But he went through the same process… and look what it got _him_." She waved a hand loosely at Flint as he was propped against the wall, still on the floor. He would have been a big man even if he hadn't been artificially grown bigger, and as such, was a hard body to move easily.

"Well… here's a good question for you." The medic began, regaining her attention for the moment, "how did you manage to live without it?"

Tori sighed. "I spent the past thirty years in an asteroid laboratory. The environment was carefully regulated and monitored."

He quirked a brow at her. "You spent all your life in a _lab_?"

Tori half-smiled at his expression. "I was the scientist, see, not the experiment."

"Oh." He nodded, looking back over at Flint. "What's his story, then?"

"I don't know it." Tori told him. "He doesn't like to talk about his past… mostly, I suspect, because much of it haunts him."

"PTSD?" The medic asked, with a resigned sigh. "Damn, never thought I'd see that mess in a Spartan. Guess there's always one, though."

Tori could only shrug. "God only knows what it is… but it goes a lot deeper than just stress, or trauma."

That earned her a look. "What do you mean?"

"He's so far gone…" Tori sighed. "Sometimes it gets so bad he'll start thinking he's looking at things that aren't there." Meeting the medic's gaze, she added, "It could be he's just blind and stupid from extended fatigue, but something tells me there's more to it… like the reason he won't let himself rest."

The medic raised a brow partway, then nodded. "And what about yourself?"

Tori blurted a laugh. "Aside from a recently discovered episode of agoraphobia… I'm _good_ compared to him."

The medic smirked. "Recently discovered?"

"From a sealed asteroid for three decades to the sudden open expanse of deep space? How would you feel?" Tori defended. "Can I know where this ship is going?"

"Jericho IV." The medic answered, easily. "Something tells me that that has little meaning to you, though."

"Didn't all of the outer colonies get glassed?" Tori asked, her face crinkling as she tried to remember which one Jericho was.

"Yes and no – most of them were glassed, some were merely razed, and a few were bypassed entirely. But we're going to Jericho to pick up a comn buoy. From there, it's Captain's prerogative."

Tori ran her gaze over him, wondering why there wasn't some kind of name tag on the guy – sure, he was just a medic, but didn't UNSC personnel wear field jackets that had their last names embroidered on a breast pocket?

The inspection made the medic grin at her, and cross his arms. "It's Naethuijs."

Tori quirked a brow at him. "Nae… got a more pronounceable name on you?"

He laughed. "Nicholas."

"Okay, that works. I'm Tori."

"Tori who? Or is it who Tori?"

She huffed at him. "Tori one-three-eight."

Naethuijs nodded, adding a silent 'ah'. Turning to face the other Spartan, he cast her a look over his shoulder. "And what's his number?"

"Zero-nine-three. But don't call him that, he hates it. You guys call him Chief." Tori advised.

"What, some of you don't even have _first_ names?" Naethuijs asked, his eyebrows up.

She shook her head. "Oh, he's a name alright. But if I tell you what it is, you'll call him by it, and he might take exception."

"Or he might imagine I'm something I'm not and that would go over about as well, I imagine." Naethuijs shrugged, looking back over. Only one of his coworkers remained squatted next to the frowning Spartan now, tapping his fingers on a data pad. "Are there any questions I can get straight answers to, out of either of you?"

"The laboratory was sanctioned under ONI section three. I rather doubt it." Tori mentioned. "You wondered who was the rat."

Naethuijs looked at her.

Tori met his gaze. "That'd be him."

"What for?"

"Because of that goop in his system that makes his blood look brown." She answered. "It'll kill him, if left alone… and we couldn't figure out how to get rid of it."

"What is it?" Naethuijs asked.

Tori sighed. Well, on the flip side, they did deserve to know. "Flood spores."

The admission jerked his eyebrows up, but the medic gave no other reaction. "I've never heard of Flood to be so mild…"

"Mild, hell. It makes him crazy." Tori exclaimed.

The medic cast her a look. "I take it that comment is explanation for why you two aren't still at said lab."

Biting her lip, Tori nodded. "He broke containment… couldn't take it anymore."

Naethuijs frowned puzzledly at her for that. "And you _left_ him out once he was out? And then followed him out the front door? Pardon me for being a little puzzled by that, but… _why_?"

Tori shrugged. "What was I supposed to do? Better I keep an eye on him, and let him work off some of that steam, than to let him disappear."

"Steam, hell. There's nothing left in that guy." Naethuijs shook his head. "We did some preliminary testing, among other things… if he doesn't drop dead soon, we'll all be surprised. And by that I mean, his current medical condition _aside_. The body – of any creature – is just not built for extended wear without rest and recovery periods."

"I know." Tori nodded. "Scientist, remember."

"So whose idea was it to make the first transfusion between you two?" The medic asked, folding his arms across his chest and cocking his head to one side. "And what made you want to try it?"

Tori shook her head. "It wasn't mine, I assure you… but I suppose the idea came up when it was discovered that the Flood wasn't having any effect on him… other than trying to squeeze him out of himself. Flood cells split at a rate of twice that of human cells, faster if under warm, moist conditions. Given that, if he doesn't split open at the seams inside a week, his internal organs will be crushed instead."

"So he's doomed no matter which way he goes?" Naethuijs asked.

She could only shrug. "I hate to call it like that… but yes. More or less. Unless something catastrophic happens… like if his antibodies move from passive to aggressive and destroy the infection."

"If that happens…" Naethuijs shook his head. "I bet you someone somewhere in the command chain will have him taken apart at the seams to find out how he did it."

"Which is just exactly why he broke containment and left the asteroid." Tori said. "ONI condemned his condition, and he wasn't willing to sit still and let them kill him."

Naethuijs shook his head, offering a short whistle. "So I take it his presence here is best left out of the records?"

"For now…" Tori nodded. "I'd appreciate it."

The medic blew a big sigh, and bit his bottom lip, looking over at Flint from under raised brows. "Cap'm's gonna want to hear this."

"A lot of people are going to want to hear it, Nick." Tori told him flatly. "And that kind of spread is the _last_ thing he needs. Honestly… if he's going to die horribly… at least let him do it in peace. Afterwards you can throw his carcass into a stasis pod and I'll ship it back to ONI if they want him so badly. Until then… so long as he's alive, he'll just murder anyone who tries to come after him."

"So I take it you weren't kidding about the whole mental issue, then…" Naethuijs asked, not looking back at her. "Took out a bunch of people back at the asteroid, didn't he?"

Tori didn't answer.

Across the bay, Flint had his head turned, looking back at her. Even a normal fellow would have been able to hear them talking, clearly enough. But for the moment, there was no expression on his face, no indicator he had an opinion to add to anything said so far.

Inwardly, the reverse was true… but the pain had ebbed with the relaxation of attempt to move, so he felt disinclined to argue with that by trying to speak. He just wanted his armor back, but that was a world away – roughly twelve feet at the moment – and he doubted he could get that far before the medical staff intervened and made him sit back down. Thor probably thought he'd never see the light of day again, removed from the suit's internal power source prior to the conclusion of a gunfight with a Marine inside the asteroid. Flint had yet to put the helmet back on after that.

Having the bulletholes looked at and treated helped, though… and that he hadn't had to do it to himself helped, too. That meant the treatment was more thorough, with less regard to what hurt too much to mess with. But every nerve ending he owned, top to bottom, was tingling as if every ounce of tissue he owned were being repeatedly stabbed by sharp little needles. At the moment, the annoying buzz was tolerable… but he knew it was a growing pain, and it would only increase and become worse as time wore on.

The Flood wasn't going to give up just because it couldn't win. In the meantime, though, it made simple gestures – from tasting his teeth to blinking his eyelids to simply breathing in and out – hurt.

Like the air was abrasive, or dry, or too hot. It tasted bad… and smelled worse. He knew why, but even after coughing the stuff up for five months straight he had yet to get used to that stench. Doubtless the medical staff around him were quietly holding their breaths.

He couldn't blame them if they were… the problem was, he couldn't do the same, pausing for breath elsewhere where the air was still clear and clean. Looking away from Tori, he heaved a sigh of his own. Maybe it hadn't been such a good idea to go after John when he had. He hadn't been in the best of conditions at the time, following only enthusiasm and hope rather than sound tactical plans. So much for all that training… to think – a Spartan, charging headlong into the worst Flood infestation a planet had to offer, all for the sake of another who nobody had seen alive in seven years.

Seven years.

He hadn't even gotten any ideal readings to indicate there would even be a body down there from the preliminary scanning! What kind of nut worked like that? Sadly, it seemed… Flint did. Because he'd gone in anyway, gone right into the heart of Flood country, and found John there, and subsequently needed to be dragged back out by the selfsame person he'd gone charging in there to rescue.

Hell of an op, that one… seemed Flood were popping up in more and more places, even as quarantine zones were set up and broadcasted for all to see and know. And while it was about as indirect a way as he'd ever heard of, there he sat, going to die horribly at Flood hands. He knew he'd missed having his chest hollowed out by an infection form, but at that point he hadn't known he couldn't catch that kind of bug.

Now, though… he half wondered if he wouldn't have simply died and stayed right where he'd been felled, the little infection pod puzzled forevermore at why it couldn't get his carcass to turn into one of those mangled combat forms that would run around looking for more food, and kill it if it found some.

And then there was Tori… had she really been following him around just to "keep him out of trouble"? He knew he hadn't figured her out, especially not after that last admission she'd blurted. Talk about brain freeze. Who could have seen that one coming? But there was more behind her motives than simple scientific and medical reasoning. Certainly more than just… and the majority of it made absolutely no sense whatsoever to Flint.

Maybe she'd explain… he ran a hand over his face, feeling the skin on his palm and his face both prickle painfully at the motion. Grimacing didn't help matters much. Sparing a look at the palm in question, he studied the lines in his hand before curling it into a fist. Each knuckle rose off the back of his hand like a miniature mountain range, the mounts squared oddly. He'd put wrinkles in a few things by punching them in the past, but at the moment it just felt good to know he still looked human… at the very least, outwardly.

That was good enough for him. It meant there was some hope of returning to what that word implied. Human on the outside, human on the inside. That, or at least Flood-free. He would settle for Flood-free.

Both medics had somehow mysteriously vanished when he looked up again, finding he'd missed when either had walked away. Maybe it was the ambient noise that everyone claimed he was imagining that had drowned it out. Still, he'd looked up again in time to watch as Tori stood herself up, testing her balance before taking the few long strides over to his position.

Sitting on the floor propped up on the wall in a medical bay onboard a UNSC Frigate had not been among his plans, but then, he'd never thought he'd spend five months in a containment cell in an asteroid, either. At least he was out of the asteroid. And, if what Tori said was at least partly true, there was a good chance he wouldn't be taken back there. Hopefully.

She came around the gurney he'd fallen off of, and squatted down next to his feet before rolling forward onto her knees and sitting back on her own heels. "Hi there."

Flint tasted his lips.

"I don't suppose asking how you feel is really necessary, considering we both know I could probably already guess." Tori began, sounding speculative.

"Ask you something?" Flint put in.

Tori quirked a brow, then lifted the other one and nodded. "Sure, okay. What's on your mind?"

"Many things." Flint admitted. "Why are you really here?"

Tori offered him an incredulous look. "What kind of question is that? I'm here cos this is where you flew us. You were the one driving, remember."

"Flying." Flint corrected. "You don't drive birds."

She sighed. "Whatever, I don't care what it's called. You were the one in control. So why are we here, Flint?"

He shook his head. "Not me. You. You called me back, you told me to take us out, you're the one who came along for the ride." Offering a small shrug, he added, "I'm wondering why. You told Tam you killed him for killing Grace."

Tori sighed. "So you're wondering when it's your turn."

"I wouldn't go that far…" Flint frowned. "You didn't shoot me, you didn't shoot _at_ me, and you seem to think my dying is a bad idea. So obviously that's not why you followed me. If you wanted to do that, you'd have done so already."

"You want to know where the exception got added."

"Or at least where that exception came from." Flint agreed.

Tori folded her arms over her thighs, letting her hands hang off the ends. "Flint… I can understand why you did what you did, even sympathize with your reaction to the treatment you went through. I don't blame you for snapping."

"But." He prompted.

"But nothing. I knew them – all of them. And even I could not find fault with what you did to them… the only one I could have cried foul for was Grace, and maybe Stanley… but they were killed by Tam's over-enthusiasm for getting rid of _you_. He shot, and he missed, and they took the fall for it. That's why I went after Tam myself." Her tone had gone flat for the last couple of sentences, showing an attempt not to show something else. "Grace was all I had… she never gave a shit that I was seven feet tall, or that I was an augment, or that I'd been engineered and trained to kill things. She treated me like a normal human being. Tam took that from me… and he didn't have to."

Flint had an idea he already knew what it was. The same sentiment shown the last time he'd seen 'Taramee. Everyone, everywhere, to some degree, had felt that sting. "And?"

Tori frowned at him. Maybe it was the one-word-prompting, but it could have been something else as well. "So while I imagine you started it… Tam knew we were in there, too. He shouldn't have done what he did. Even if it hadn't been you – if it had merely been a loose airborne spore – I can assure you he'd have reacted the same way. He was a good scientist, but a terrible little man."

"Some people only have one mode of living." Flint told her, quietly. It was, in part, reference to who she was talking about… but it also qualified himself, and he knew it. The part where he'd gone and hunted the asteroid staff down was part of that aspect on display. "They don't know anything else."

"You're not like that, Flint." Tori said, apparently a little delusional, herself. Seeing things that were not there, indeed! "Maybe I don't know you very well, but I like to think I'm a pretty good judge of character." If it hadn't been painful just considering it, he would have laughed at her.

"I have another question, trailing along that same line of thought." Flint said. "About what you are, I mean."

"I well imagine you've quite a few questions for me, Flint." Tori told him. "I'm okay with that. There are things I'm not allowed to say, but I seriously doubt you know enough to ask about them."

"Where'd the death wish come from?"

Tori's eyebrows rose. "The what? What do you mean?"

"You've a death wish, you must." Flint said. "Else you'd have never stepped through the seal into my cell."

Tori sighed, looking down.

"And while we're on that thought…"

She looked back up.

"Why'd you kiss me?"


	14. A SPARTAN Effort

**14: A SPARTAN EFFORT**

Of questions there remained many, as on both sides there was evident reluctance to provide answers. For everything he wouldn't tell her, there were things she wouldn't say. But she got the distinct impression that there were far superior reasons at his end.

Eight quiet days and then Jericho IV appeared through the port windows… it was actually more transparent steel, though this stuff was ship-grade hull plating and was quite a bit thicker than a single inch. Tori got the feeling that she could fire rockets at it and only blister the stuff… and not even badly enough to really cause fear of a breach.

That was, she'd learned, the nature of 'ship-grade'… there really was some clout behind the meaning of that term. It made her feel better, but being able to see out was still disconcerting. Flint, the little twerp, had taken to the window sides like candy, whereas Tori almost couldn't bear to look at them. The separation periods usually stayed brief – the ship crew tended to tiptoe around the two Spartans a lot, making it hard to find solace in the empty quiet of the areas aboard all by themselves.

To Tori, it was strange not seeing any of the other scientists around, but for Flint, it was hard to handle having so many eyes looking his way. If Tori was paying attention, though, he wouldn't try anything… and so far, only once had she needed to rescue an unfortunate grease monkey who got too close and stayed there for too long. Flint was still twitchy, still on edge. Tori well imagined he'd stay that way for a while, for as calming as she could be, she was still no substitute for the cure to what really and truly ailed him.

The nightmares.

She knew he wasn't getting any sleep, but he'd sit there and watch her as she did… which in turn was making it hard for _her_ to sleep. She'd never been under such close observation before. Still, if it kept anyone else from getting killed, she'd tolerate it in silence. The last thing the _Nine Lives_ needed was for Flint to snap again, and wipe out the whole ship.

That was if his weakened state didn't wipe _him_ out, sans any help from outside sources. He did seem to be doing a little better on the rations available in the general mess than on what he'd been getting back at the lab, but Tori had learned that there was more than one definition to the word 'green', when it came to Flint.

And there were times when he looked a different shade than the Flood afforded him.

But today, Jericho IV had appeared, and much of the crew seemed to relax a little at their arrival. Tori stood about five feet behind Flint, who was standing there looking down through the transparent steel ship hull at the world spinning gently below the them, seemingly transfixed by the sight. Tori knew better than to assume this was the actual case, though – experience had taught her that he paid better attention than that. The episode where she'd found herself looking down the barrel of a magnum in his hands was not a fluke event.

Jericho IV itself was a curious sight – partially glassed at some point in the past, now there were naked fields of glowing red-and-black scarring much of the landmasses, but it was sporadically interspersed with long tracts of green and sometimes brown and blue. The damage from the orbital fire had spread out like liquid in a pot, but only so far – and the planet's ecosystem had doubtless suffered greatly. But that it had not simply dissolved the rest of the way into a dead, lifeless husk with tectonically active plates and belching volcanoes was sign of the stubborn durability of any good ecosystem – the planet was still going to try to survive the storm that had ravaged its surface.

If there was anything sentient living down there, though, Tori had not asked and couldn't guess. While things like moss and some insects would be able to subsist in such harsh environments, bigger, more fragile things like trees and deer might not. So humans would need to have environmental dome shields, like what was found on Mars back before the place had been terraformed appropriately.

"Big place." Tori said, eventually.

"Not really." Flint answered, sounding absentminded. "Jericho's only about three quarters the size of Earth."

Tori's brow knit. "Um… okay." It still looked big to her… but then, a UNSC Frigate was big, too, compared to the asteroid she'd called home for so long. How would she really know the true definition of big until after she'd seen more? It seemed _everything_ she looked at qualified for that description!

While obviously off his rocker more days than not, Flint still retained some semblance of order in his otherwise chaotic ways; standing there looking out the floor-to-ceiling, front-to-back window that ran the length of that side of the room they were in, he could easily have been mistaken for someone waiting to be ambushed by a senior officer; feet shoulder-width apart, shoulders squared and set, back straight… hands clasped in the small of his back. He'd gotten pretty good at not showing the fact that he was feeling miserable all the time.

"So…" Tori braved a step closer to what looked for all intents and purposes to be a gaping hole in the side of the ship, nearer to where he'd put himself. "Is there anything down there? A colony? Research outpost?"

Flint just shook his head. "She's barren."

"Anything indigenous left?" Tori ventured another step, feeling wobby and afraid she'd get sucked out through the window at any moment.

He gave a soft chuckle. "Relax, Tori… the window won't eat you."

Tori snorted at him. "Says you."

At that, he turned his head, casting her one of those cat-like smirks she hadn't seen him wear since before her own contamination. There was an amused look in his eye, suggesting there was more to why he was looking at her like that than just the tease about her agoraphobia. "I daresay I've seen enough of these sort of things to know."

"In your condition? That experience might well be imagined." Tori argued, prodding right back. Still, she managed to get herself up to the same distance from said window as he was, beside him. "Anyway… anything indigenous?"

"I wouldn't know, Tori, I haven't been to the surface to look." Flint answered, still half-smiling despite her jab. It was, after all, an argument about the appetite of ship-grade transparent steel for jittery scientists. How could one legitimately say that such an appetite existed? She was unsettled by the openness, but joking about the window itself was a good sign. Perhaps she'd adjust, and be able to operate normally soon enough.

"Okay, then." Tori blew a sigh, feeling very exposed and trying not to show it – trying simultaneously to not _actually_ look out that window she was facing. "So where's the buoy? I don't see anything floating around out there."

"You won't." Flint told her. "It's only about as big as a standard dropship… which makes it very hard to spot at any kind of distance. Ambient light tends to swallow such things after you get a ways off from them."

She cast him a look. "Feeling optimal today, are we? That's a lot of coherent know-how coming out of you all of a sudden."

Flint just shrugged; not a yes, but not a no.

Looking at him – something much closer than the planet and offering a sense of scale a little closer to home that was much less overwhelming – proved an ease of mind compared to the window, so she left her gaze where she'd flicked it to. This, however, soon earned her a return look, with a rather unsettled expression attached.

He, naturally, wanted to know why he was being examined… "What?"

Defeated utterly, Tori shook her head, looking back out the window she faced even though she knew she didn't really want to. Past the curve of the planet, she thought she saw something explode spectacularly, so she pointed at it. "What's that?"

Flint looked there, but remained silent.

"Looks kind of like something exploded…" Tori began, but her continuation finally earned her a reply, and she got interrupted by it.

"Slipspace rupture. That's an explosion of subatomic particles and dimensional flotsam… however I'd be a bit more concerned about what it was that just came out of the hole in question." Flint told her, dropping his arms and stepping back a pace. "That's an old Covenant cruiser."

Turning to follow his sudden retreat from the room, Tori hopped into place behind him. She had a feeling he was going after his armor… as broken as it was. "How do you know? Don't the Elites drive those things, too?"

Just shy of the door, Flint paused, and turned halfway to look back at her. She drew up short of smacking into him bodily, but drew back somewhat when she saw the look in his silver eyes. "Just trust me on this one. I just know."

That old familiar itch of not having a clue about the story behind his ability to tell the difference resurfaced again, but Tori squelched it as she clenched her jaw. There was really no point in asking him again – he'd only either tell her no, change the topic, or merely shake his head quietly at her just like all the times before. It seemed being out of the cell hadn't loosened him up hardly at all. When he moved again, though, she kept pace behind him, wishing he wasn't so bottled.

Certainly some of those stories would be enthralling to hear told… it would also improve her own ignorance. Obviously, there were lessons to be learned from what he'd been through, else he would not have that particular set in his stride, the posture that screamed 'johnny get your guns'.

Tori, though, had no intention of participating in a firefight, if it came to that. She followed him most of the way up the length of the ship heading towards the requisitioned quarters afforded them, but not all the way. Nearing the medical bay, Tori stuck her tongue out at the twisted cramp in her side, and turned off Flint's path, pressing the heel of a hand onto her side as she headed instead to the infirmary. There had to be more to the feeling of foreboding she was getting… but how could she really justify staying in the medical bay, weak, sick, when Flint was going to walk out onto the battlefield given half a chance?

Odds were good that if he did that, he'd die there. Odds were also pretty good he'd be first kill – and nobody would have time to compensate for the crush to morale the Marines would suffer once they'd watched him fall. Still, ships had their own guns, and hopefully all the fight they saw would be external.

Heading on without her – he'd noticed when she'd deviated from her usual place trailing along behind him wherever he went – Flint made it into his quarter, and began to pull on the ragged, broken Mjolnir. It looked like a heap of bullet-riddled junk, but even though the shield emitter was fried, and the armor plating itself was full of holes, it was still a far better armor than anything a Marine might get to wear. Mjolnir would stop bullets, and redistribute the concussive force of impact.

A Marine's flak jacket wouldn't even really stop the bullets, more often than not. Dressed, Flint spared a moment to look at his reflection in the helmet's visor before taking a breath and seating it over his head. He knew he didn't look like much outwardly – he knew he also didn't feel like all that much either. But if there was one thing he would never rebuke, it was opportunity to be where everything was normal, and real, and obvious. There were no blurred lines on the battlefield. Brutes were bad guys, and he had yet to meet one that didn't want to kill him. Marines, conversely, were the good guys, his backup more often than not, and when things went south, sometimes the unfortunate souls who he had to rescue.

Or who got to rescue him. That part, though, had not happened in a long while. Mainly, all the saving he'd needed had been done by the Elites of late. They would never let him forget that he was one of them, nor would they allow anyone else to suggest otherwise, either.

There were days when that small detail was all that kept him upright.

Reaching the weapon's locker, he pulled out a standard battle rifle with the holographic ammo counter embedded in the top under the rear sights, and checked it over once to make sure it was in good working order. That was always an important ritual before any given fight.

Catching him there, a wandering Marine drew back to watch. "What's the gun for, Chief?"

"Brutes just came in." Flint mumbled, past his peering down the dark hole inside the pulled slide chute. Releasing the action bar, he reached for the first of what could be many dozens of magazines of ammunitions, and loaded the weapon. The lighted display on the top of the gun flashed once as the magazine triggered the activation, then after a moment's hesitation, it read a bright and eager green 60. Flint waited for the synch to show up in his HUD, but it never did… oh well, must have been damaged with the shield emitters.

"Brutes?" The Marine asked, starting to approach. Flint stepped away, watching him select his own BR and load the thing. "Expecting boarders?"

"Let's just say I like being disappointed." He answered. "Yes, I expect boarders. If anyone else around here is smart, so too will they."

Lifting the rifle to rest the top of the barrel against his shoulder, the Marine quirked a brow at him. "Then I guess one of us will have to go tell the others to get ready to be disappointed, too, huh?"

"You do that." Flint decided. He didn't know where the Marines hung out on this ship, nor did he really feel up to trying to rally any of them. Instead, as the man walked out the forward exit, Flint headed out the rear. Boarding craft liked to auger in where the hull was thin and the interior was open enough to guarantee their drill didn't just bore a hole into a floor, and leave the boarding party unable to enter the ship. That almost exclusively meant fighter bays. On occasion one would go for a random window, where it was obvious where the floor was.

Getting down to the bays in question earned him a lot of looks, but he walked for lack of any emergent need to run, and with the gun in the grappling locks on his back for lack of the gumption to hang onto the thing. Guns could get damn heavy given enough time to stand around holding one. Still, seeing a Spartan in full battle dress go walking meaningfully down the hall was cause enough for a stir.

At almost the exact moment he stepped through the doorway into the bay and got under a Pelican, the ship-wide alarm shrieked out at the crew. Turning under the port fuselage of the Pelican, Flint made his way towards the bay door itself, pausing a few feet back from the barriers and folding his arms across his chest to wait.

They'd come to him… they almost always did. At the moment, the holes in his armor didn't bother him, nor did the idea that if one of the boarding craft – if indeed there ever were any – missed a grapple punch and popped free, he'd get sucked out and die from exposure to vacuum.

Holes in an environmentally sealed armor suit was almost as good as being helmetless… the unfortunate soul to get spaced would still die horribly, just slightly slower. He was still standing there an hour later, arms crossed, eyes on the nearest bay door, when he heard Thor finally activate.

"_Situation update?_" The AI inquired, sounding as if he really didn't expect to get one.

"Waiting for a Brute to come over." Flint answered, casually. The truth was, the utter lack of doing anything – even something as sedate as walking – was starting to put him to sleep. On the flipside, though, the last thing he wanted was to be caught by a boarding party while snoozing… even if he usually came flying awake like a grenade going off.

That only hurt unsuspecting friendlies… "_We are aboard a UNSC Frigate…_" Thor mused, as if only having just realized that. _"When did that happen?_"

"Couple of days ago." Flint answered. "Is there something wrong with the contact feeds in my armor or something? You used to key on as soon as I had the helmet on."

"_Thanks for asking._" Thor grumbled, sarcastically. "_Your armor, as it were, is a piece of crumbling junk. It needs catastrophic repair in some places, and utter replacement of parts in most._"

Flint just grunted. A handful of Marines had gathered near the doors, watching him, but their presence – and that they were wearing their own armors and all of them had a rifle on them – was a small comfort. He wasn't sure if he really felt up to grappling with a Brute… or hell, with anything. The all-too-familiar twinge of hunger mixed with the dire threat of regurgitation should he dare to eat anything at all was beginning to twist in his guts again, but so long as he didn't try to do much, it wouldn't get very bad. Usually, 'much' tended to encompass any physical motion whatsoever. Turning his head, he took in the extent of the bay. There weren't hardly any crates lying around, most of those married up snug to the back wall under the noses of the Pelicans. Above them, held in suspension racks, were the Shortswords. The Longswords were in a different bay somewhere farther up the hull, he'd heard. That was good.

There were a couple – count them, two – of parts crates sitting in more or less random spots out near the blood trays, but they'd likely only impede progress a little. One or two crates was not sufficient to hide an entire boarding party behind, much less two. As he stood there waiting, memories of the last time he'd been on a UNSC fighting vessel drifted past. The Marines he'd worked with had been eliminated to a man, the ship destroyed and the fleeing remnants of the crew hunted down and slain. He'd watched it all happen through the canopy of his Longsword, watched as the last of his allies trailed down through the upper atmosphere as glittering shrapnel.

Blood crystallized into shiny diamond-edged plates in vacuum… and shorn quickly enough, so too did stealth-sheathed metal hull plating. He closed his eyes, trying not to see the swarm of Seraphs collecting and coming after his lonely remaining self, or the impassable wall of plasma fired at him in a communal effort to bring him down.

It had worked, and although he hadn't suffered detonation in vacuum, he'd still gone uncontrollably down through the atmosphere at a very bad angle. The Longsword had struck a mountain peak, somehow, just right to bounce and go spinning like a top down into the valley gorge where it buried its broken nose into the soil at the bottom.

Where it buried most of G'wi's patrol. And where, he remembered with a grimace as it began to itch again, the forward landing strut had been torn free of its chassis and speared backwards up through the nose of the bird through and into the cockpit, where it had pinned him to the seat through his shoulder. That one still hurt… even when he'd forgotten it was there, it hurt.

External sound got his attention, so he opened his eyes, and looked around again. A smirk etched into his grizzled features when he spied the circular burn marks glowing against the nearest door. Off to his side, he heard one of the Marines talking. "…Cap'm says their ship's dead in the water, but they're not giving up. They took out our slipspace capability so we need to buy time for the guys down in engineering to get it fixed."

"Copy that." Another piped up. "How many are we expecting?"

"Uh…" The lot of them looked up from their positions – behind some cover, Flint noted – as the circle of metal door plating came free and crashed to the deck. "That many." The first thing through was a Grunt in red armor, his breather mask on crooked and his plasma pistol already extended fore. Flint reached for his rifle reflexively, but found his left arm nolonger curled that far over his head when he tried it. Memory flashed upwards, and he recalled he'd stuck the gun over his right shoulder anyway… reaching that with his left arm would be a trick, for sure. Correcting, he brought the rifle down, and aimed it.

By that point, three more Grunts had come out and were trading fire with the Marines, and the first Brute to come through had just appeared in the cutout. Foregoing the Grunts for the moment, Flint leveled the barrel of the rifle at the Brute's face and fired. Bullets zinged off the alien's shield at first, but while the first half of the magazine got that out of the way, it also got the Brute's attention in full.

Roaring at the sight of a Spartan standing there – seeming casual enough – the alien threw down his spike rifle and yanked the brute shot from his back. A momentary sense of dread flickered past Flint;

"Oh, shit."

He got the butt end of his rifle up and out to meet the charging Brute's face, but at the same time as those two connected, the blade end of the grenade launcher bit deep into the armor around Flint's side. Metal screamed as it dented and tore, gouges peeling out of the blade as a long slice worked down into the Mjolnir. Pushed back by the impact, Flint staggered away, feeling weirdly buoyant and equally as off balance.

Hardly hurt at all by the blow to the head – though just a little dizzied – the Brute shook it off and came again, this time aiming the curled knife like a spear, aiming to drive the pointed end through Flint's front. Ducking was easy – he deliberately gave up in the fight to stay upright with his knees, and down he went. But then he was down… and now what? He kicked a foot out from under the overextended Brute, and it landed atop him in a sprawl with a huff.

Flint gagged as the weight came down over him, grappling against the descending alien in a failing attempt to redirect the fall. The Brute flailed in his grasp at first, before catching a wrist and pulling it straight even while rolling back against his feet. Flint followed his arm sideways first, but as soon as he realized which arm that was – gah, the left again! – he reached for it with his right and grabbed ahold. It was the only way to keep the agony down to bearable levels.

Unhindered, the Brute stood, hauling Flint up with him, and when he had the lagging Spartan where he wanted him, he hauled back with his free hand balled into a fist. Flint stuck his readily available elbow up under the intended punch, thwarting the intention and threading the strike aside. But now he understood he'd made a particularly fatal mistake.

He should not have come to this battle.

The Brute slung him out against the grip on his wrist, and without his defending right attached to it, he came against the end of that slinging motion with a sickening crunch he felt the entire galaxy could have heard.

His jaw set and clenched, but the strained cry of protest and pain still got out through his teeth. Dropped a moment later, he rolled over once on the floor before coming to a stop. Looking up, he saw the Brute following him with a quick kick straight to his middle. Agony surged through his ribs as a split fractured the broken Mjolnir over his chest, but he had no more air to give it, and could only gasp.

Unwilling to believe he'd defeated Flint that easy, the Brute followed still, raising a foot and bringing it down across Flint's head. Impact jarred him, but not nearly as much as it did the armor – a frightening crack appeared suddenly in the blast glass of the visor, flowering out from in front of his mouth and reaching veins up to obscure over his eyes.

When he failed to move after that, the Brute turned away long enough to return to his dropped weaponry, ducking through a hail of fire from the suddenly enraged Marines.

* * *

"Spartan is down! I repeat, Spartan is down!" The cry sounded like a hammerstrike on Tori's chest. Though sick to her stomach, all her prior reluctance to join Flint evaporated as the Marine's words cut over the radio on the passing troops' comn. She turned to follow them with her gaze, before shoving out of the doorway and charging after them. They were running flat out, but they seemed in slow motion by comparison.

"Shit." The word came out from between her clenched teeth as a harsh whisper. She blew past the reinforcing Marines in the corridor, and darted the length of the ship in what felt like a couple of long strides. She felt her boots slide as she braced for an all-stop, coming hard around a corner right into the fighter bays. Directly ahead, there was one Marine down and another with his hand on his fallen friend's wound, the gun in his other hand pointing up, and his attention pointed down. Without stopping, Tori shot past, catching that gun out of his hand as if he'd held it out just for her.

In passing, she heard the crunch of snapping finger bones, and the responding scream of protest and pain the robbed Marine emitted, but she ignored it. Beyond the foremost rank of men tucked into the crates and fighters, she could see where the boarding vehicle had attached, and even where the current population of aliens was standing. Her feet found their own way, pounding across the decking and striking a sideways crate to get her past the foremost alien – a Grunt – and to her intended prey. As she arced down through the air from her momentum-inspired leap, Tori looked down.

With the nearest ugly hairy monkey, she could see Flint, lying in a half-sprawl on his side under a pair of Brutes, one holding a large-bored weapon with an even larger knife stuck to the butt end, and the other holding a pair of enormous pistols that had a pair of blades each under the barrels. Spikes whistled through the air past her thin frame, but none struck, leaving her home free coming down again verily on top of them.

The creature lifted its head, seeming in slow motion, to look up and see her. Raising the MA series like a knife, she gripped it over the barrel and behind the butt, and as she came down, she plunged the entire front half of the weapon through the Brute's face, sending the barrel and fore grip splashing out the back of the alien's skull.

Everything hit the deck at once; the body of the Brute, its unfortunate companion, and Tori. The slain Brute crumpled, but Tori was high on adrenalin and followed the Brute down like a pouncing cat, to come to rest crouched on its broad shoulders, the gun still embedded through its head. The sight of the Brute's demise had sent the other aliens reeling… the Grunts outright fled in terror, the Jackals turned tail and formed their phalanx some distance back, and the other Brutes stumbled over themselves backing up. Backing away, she knew, from the primal animal she had shown them, the mighty predator they knew they could never defeat. Though that scream might need some working on…

Lurching to the side, Tori grabbed Flint by the armor over his shoulders, and began to drag him backwards toward the line the Marines had formed. She hoped he was alive, but she had no idea what had happened, and couldn't tell until after given the chance to look if he needed quick medical attention. Once behind the other men – who strangely rallied and pressed the sudden advantage – Tori actually looked at the prize she'd fought to win.

"Flint?" She couldn't see his face through the fractured visor, but nor could she see any other piece of him. "Flint, can you hear me?"

She got a small nod. "Yeah." The slight distortion of feeding through the external comn unit embedded in the helmet made him sound gruff, but that he'd responded at all heartened her.

"What happened?" Tori asked, running a hand down the armor plating over his chest, looking for the bullet scoring that went too deep. There were a few, but there was no blood on them to indicate freshness. She did find the long slice cut into the side from the butt-end of the brute shot, though, and slid her fingers through the light splattering of blood flecked over the exterior. "You're hit…"

"…help me up." Was all Flint said.

"Help you up? Flint, you're wounded! You're _bleeding_." Tori protested, but he'd begun to try anyway, so she complied and aided the endeavor. "What happened? Why is your faceplate cracked?"

"Bastard kicked me." Flint answered, sounding hoarse. She saw him dig his fingers into the armor over his left shoulder, but before she could ask why he did that – there was no obvious damage to the armor in that location – he dropped his hand and picked up a discarded weapon from the floor.

"I don't think you should be here, Flint." Tori issued, starting to feel ill again now the adrenalin was wearing off. "We should go, the Marines can handle this."

"I'm fine." Flint argued. He turned around wondering at the truth of that admission, though. After having his bum shoulder jerked on, his guts kicked and his head stomped… not to mention that new cut in his armor… he really needed to get new armor. Tori watched him take the first few steps forward, aiming the rifle one-handed and flattening a pair of Grunts that weren't paying any attention to him.

Seeing another Brute leap clear of the breach, she felt suddenly exposed and defenseless, so she turned away from it for a second, looking for something to shoot back with. Seeing the first Brute's discarded spike rifles, she gauged her odds of getting at them before the Brute got to her. When it raised its plasma rifle and sent rounds towards Flint, though, she knew she had a narrow window of opportunity. Flint hit the hull of the Pelican behind him and quit backing up under the splashing impact of the plasma, already feeling the metal growing too hot for comfort. If the crystal gel layer was gone, he'd roast long before the rounds ever got to actually bore holes through him.

"Die!" The Brute commanded, jerking a spherical object from the belt around his hips and crushing it in his grip before pulling that arm back as if to throw it. The inclusion of a sharp glow on the object finally told Flint what that thing was supposed to be, and he cursed his slowed brains. Maybe Tori was right, and it was time to admit what he'd already figured out.

Spikes embedded all down the Brute's left side, but he'd been primed and reflex threw the grenade for him even as he howled in pain. Flint lurched to one side, collapsing to his knees again on the floor. But the plasma grenade bounced off the Pelican over his descending head and dropped verily atop him, falling into the space between his legs and the Pelican's struts. Flint clawed at the floor grating, aware he didn't have time to get away from the thing before it would go off and kill him.

He'd be in several pieces when that happened. No coming back from that one.

Dropping the first spike rifle, Tori slung the other one up and emptied that one into the Brute, too, and when that still didn't drop him, she brought both arms down and gashed his chest open on the blades under the barrels. Down at last, she turned back to see right as Flint got back to his feet, and behind him, spied the grenade. She frowned at it, puzzled for what it might be and why it was glowing like that.

In the eternity it took for the next moment to come and go, Flint looked up, back at Tori, and saw the Brute she'd run off during her introduction charge back over from behind her, spike rifles of its own in hand. Grenade forgotten, the pain forgotten, for just a fleeting moment, Flint pulled into a running leap in Tori's direction. The motorized joints in his failing armor accelerated the press, landing him at her side right at the same time as the first volley of ammunition. Tori jerked when the first one slammed through her, but Flint got her spun out of the way of all the rest before more damage could be done.

She dropped into a sideways tumble under a Pelican when he let go, but she was out of the line of fire, and with only one spike through her hide. At that moment, the grenade under the other one erupted, lifting the rear of the Pelican off the decking for an instant. Saved from the blast by the other Pelican, Tori got to watch without getting killed by it. Grimacing, she looked down at the spike in her side, her scientist's mind analyzing the nature of the wound even as her instinct told her it wasn't that bad. Grabbing the leading edge of the spike, she braced her elbow on her ribs and yanked. A small shriek escaped as the thing slid free, but now it was out, she felt mobile again.

Rolling out from under the Pelican, she turned over onto a knee, and stepped upright from there. A rainbow of blood covered the deck, but the first thing she saw after that realization was Flint dropping back from around the back edge of the Pelican she'd been under. He hit the deck and stayed there, only turning partly onto a shoulder as if to rise, but stopping there. Stepping around the end of the Pelican, though, she saw the Brute in question with another glowing spherical thing in his hairy paw.

When he reached to toss it onto Flint, and realizing her fellow Spartan was not getting back up this time, Tori took it upon herself to rectify the situation. Braving the storm of flak she might earn in doing so, she threw herself at the Brute as if to hug it. Startled at the suddenness of her appearance, the alien first stumbled back, but she was already on him. Reaching past the Brute, Tori clawed the primed grenade out of his withdrawn hand, then brought up her other elbow and socked him in the throat with it. The Brute's mouth clacked shut hard, then jerked open, so she shoved the grenade inside.

With that, she arched back to balance, braced a foot outward for a moment, then spun around and planted her boot into the brute's belly. The Brute leapt backwards almost a full yard before landing hard on his back on the blood tray of the same Pelican she'd been under a moment ago, and in the last moments of the fuse, she leapt upon the Brute, grabbed a handful of his scruff, and threw him bodily up into the interior.

She spun away and leaped out sideways, barely clearing the blast as the Brute's head exploded in a gory spray of plasma, flak, bone and brain matter. Landing on her feet, she paused, looking around at the remaining Marines. The last of the boarding party was already dead, leaving the ship bay quiet. Most of the men were all looking back at her, though one or two were shooting pointed looks at Flint.

Tori's gaze dropped to meet him on the floor, one hand rising to touch the hole in her side. The spike had gone through the muscle wall, not her internal organs, but that didn't keep it from bleeding enough to soak her shirt and that side of her pants as well. Feeling flushed and hot, Tori stepped closer to where Flint lay. At first she thought she might pick him up, but then she decided even bending or kneeling was not an appealing thought, so she just sufficed with nudging him with a boot. "Hey, you still alive?"

The treatment earned her a few puzzled looks from the Marines, some of them disassembling to carry their own off to the medical bay as a couple of others ventured near to help there.

"Uh huh." Flint grunted, wanting to smack her for kicking him too, but lacking the strength. He certainly wasn't going to get up on his own… but seeing through the cracks in his visor to see where he would go once up was a whole other matter.

"Okay." Tori sniffed, and looked up, her brow knitted. "I don't feel so good."

"You been shot." Flint mentioned, grumpily. "That's… expected."

She shook her head, even though she knew he wasn't looking at her, and even if he was, he probably wouldn't have seen it anyway. "I don't mean like that…"

He turned his head to look up at her, struggling just to push up to a seated position. From there, he watched as she sank to her knees, then sat on her heels, her expression pinched. She looked as if she couldn't get enough air in through her nose, breathing through her open mouth instead as she stared forelornly at the floor. "…Tori?"

The look she gave him was not promising.


	15. Running Amidships

**15: RUNNING AMIDSHIPS**

She was fading, and fading fast. Despite everything wrong with him, he soon found he was all that kept either of them as upright as seated would afford. The quickness of earlier had worn out the last of whatever he might have had to offer, though, and it was hard just to stay seated. Trying to hold Tori up too was taxing beyond reason. Surely staying seated upright wasn't this much trouble!

Flint watched through the distorting cracks in his visor as the boots of a Marine made the steps around his side and up in front of him, before the fellow squatted down, bringing his knees in sight of his downward gaze. Lifting it slightly, trying to peer through the upper left corner where it wasn't so badly fractured, Flint tried to see what the Marine was doing.

"She alright, sir?"

He shook his head.

"Want me to call the medical?" The Marine asked.

"It wouldn't happen fast enough to make any difference." Flint decided. She wasn't letting his uncomfortably warm armor cool any, that was for sure. "Got a stim on you?"

The question earned him a puzzled look, but the Marine nodded, twisting around and setting a knee on the floor so he could pry his personal medkit off his gear belt. Once he had it in hand, he popped it open and dumped out the tightly packed supplies to get at the pre-filled needle-tipped syringe. It was very small, Flint supposed, for a stim shot. Maybe they'd concentrated the stuff they used as stims to make it easier to pack around or something. It didn't really help what he had in mind, though.

Biting the plastic sheath, the Marine pulled down, tearing off one end and opening the packet. Spitting out the plastic left between his teeth, he turned the packet over and shook the syringe out into his other hand. Removing the needle guard, he offered it, intact, to Flint.

"Empty it." Flint instructed.

The Marine pondered the nature of the instruction, but when he twitched in Tori's direction, Flint elaborated;

"Onto the floor, not into her."

"What?" The Marine asked, puzzled. "Why? What good would that do?"

Prying his arms out from around Tori's collapsed form, Flint reached for the catches on the jawline of his helmet. He'd need to see what he was doing, here shortly… "Because all I need is the needle."

"…oh." Frowning for lack of explanation, the Marine pointed the needle out into a random direction, and pushed in the plunger, sending a thin spray of stimulant shooting out through the air to land uselessly on the blood-strewn floor. Doubtless it would get hosed out with the blood, but in the meantime, it seemed a waste to the Marine. He looked back, watching as Flint set his helmet aside, and started to detach the gauntlet from one arm.

When he had the Mjolnir out of the way, Flint took the syringe from the Marine, and through an old hole torn through the skinsuit in the area, found a vein. When he had what he hoped was enough – it was as much as the little thing would hold – he pulled it out of his arm and lifted Tori's head. They'd stuck it in her neck last time… but last time, it had been all him and no Flood. The sickly brown shit he could see through the plastic syringe would be a heady dose of Flood spores… but there was no time to weigh the odds. Either it worked, or she died anyway. The latter option seemed the more likely, the former seemed the only intervention that would be timely enough to matter.

She was already dead to rights for the Flood infection anyway, right? Trying to steady the needle took a lot more effort than he thought it ought to, but he found what he was aiming for, and administered the badly contaminated dose. She twitched once, but otherwise seemed not to respond. Flint figured it was enough to last her the trip to the medbay, despite all the drawbacks.

"Now you get two or three of your friends and you drag her if you have to." Flint said, looking back up at the Marine. "Get her into medical."

"That was the _weirdest_…" But he trailed off, moving to comply, leaving the rest of the medkit scattered on the floor in his wake. It took four of them, but they got Tori off the floor and in motion. Flint watched them go until he couldn't anymore, then looked down at the abandoned medkit.

"What about you, sir?" He might well have been the only remaining Marine on the deck, unless there was someone else behind Flint where he couldn't see, being quiet.

"Think I'll sit here a while." Flint decided. Looking up, he tried to pick out features against the harsh white lights embedded in the ceiling. He had brown hair and brown eyes on honey skin, but his face was angular and smooth, with only a small line drawn over the side of his chin to indicate he'd ever had his head bashed into anything. To Flint, it was almost like a habit he just couldn't seem to kick…

"Mind if I sit with you, sir?" The Marine asked.

Amused, Flint shook his head. "Not at all."

When the fellow finished sitting down, he tucked his legs up under his bottom, and dropped his hands across a boot. "Permission to – "

"Yeah."

The Marine chuckled lightly. "I didn't even get to finish asking."

"So?" Flint asked.

"I might have been asking for permission to sock you in the head, sir." The Marine jibed.

"You weren't asking for that." Flint said. "You had something to say."

"Ah, drat." The Marine shook his head, pouting for a moment before grinning again. "I am just too darn easy to read. The guys do it to me, too."

"So what was it you wanted to say?" Flint asked, bored with the rambling.

"Well, it's a toss-up, sir." The Marine decided, casting a look into the back end of the gutted Pelican. "I'm glad I'm not a grease monkey… I'm glad she's not mad at _me_… I'm also glad I'm not you, today."

Flint grunted.

"With all due respect, sir, you look like hell." The Marine informed him, offering one of those looks that translates into sincerity tinted with uncertainty regarding the admission.

"Nothing new." Flint assured him. "Been a while since I got my ass handed to me, though."

The Marine nodded once. "Was interesting, watching you… even beat to shit and frail as a leaf you still won. Pardon the terms, sir."

Flint just chuckled.

"What's her issue, though, if I might ask?"

"Take too long to explain." Flint told him, running his eyes over the Pelican the Marine had referenced. Indeed, the inside was sheathed in gore, what remained of the lower body lying on the decking besides. The headache racks were a mess, and the seating along the sides had been torn up, as well as the stitching of ragged holes in the floor. Fixing that was going to be a beast.

"Can I ask you something about her, sir?" The Marine eventually asked, regaining his attention from the Pelican's ruined interior.

"About her?" Flint echoed. "I don't really know that much about her… she doesn't tell me much."

The Marine gave him a half-grin. "I was just wondering where she learned to fight Brutes, is all… I have never ever seen anyone shove their gun through a Brute's head… nor have I seen them roundhouse one into a Pelican with a grenade crammed down his throat, either."

Flint pondered that. "Well… I guess it was made up as she went along."

"Why do you think that, sir?"

"Cos she hasn't held a gun in thirty years." Flint answered, looking back at the Pelican.

The Marine sat there in silence for a few seconds, just watching him stare at the Pelican, before coming up with his next question. "You don't talk like the last Spartan I ran into did." When the comment earned him a look, he added, "You don't mind my saying so, sir, you actually sound more like a Marine than a Spartan."

Flint smirked. "Ran with the fifty-first for a little too long, is all. They rubbed off on me."

The Marine raised an eyebrow. "Didn't they get shot down over Kanaeghio, sir?"

"Yes."

"Were you still with their dispatch at that point?"

"Sure was."

The Marine's expression rumpled for a moment before he asked, "How'd you get out of there?"

"I didn't." Flint answered, plainly. "They shot me down, too."

"Oh, so you hung out on the surface for a while, then?" The Marine asked.

It wasn't a lie, so Flint nodded. Let him think the UNSC had come back through with a ship after the Covenant left; it was easier than explaining how G'wi had taken him prisoner, had him executed, then broke him out of stasis and escaped the Schism with him, before chasing down Truth only to fall far short. Much, much easier.

As if sensing the conversation had run dry, the Marine stood up, and stuck a hand out. "Well, come on, then, sir… you can't be sitting there all day. Got some nicks of your own needing seeing to."

Flint looked at the hand. It was the wrong one… there was no way in hell he was going to try to drag himself to his feet on the support of his left arm alone. In defiance of the offer, he stuck his other arm up instead; without missing a beat, the Marine took it and pulled. He was stronger than he looked, though, and he got Flint onto his feet without pulling a muscle to do it.

When Flint turned away, the Marine scooped up the bits of armor and the helmet and followed.

Arriving at the medical bay, Flint ducked through the door he'd dented on arrival, noting that it closed now. Someone must have hammered out his indentation, so the door could slip past. From the inside, he could tell that just that had happened; the metal was still slightly wrinkled where he'd struck it, but it was out of the way and there was only a short scratch mark on the door where it had dragged at first.

Finding Tori awake, he went that way, feeling his feet getting heavier with each step. If his Mjolnir was on its last legs, he'd need to get out of it before it seized up and kept him from being able to move anymore. That was one thing about powered armor – the joints especially – that had always worried him. If power was ever lost, he'd be a frozen statue until someone saw fit to peel him out of the stuff.

"Hi there." Tori greeted, a weak smile plastered across her face. "I told you so."

Flint quirked a brow at her. "Told me so? Told me so about what?"

"I told you not to go down there, and I was right." She answered, sounding a little amused. "How you feeling?"

"Dead on my feet." Flint answered, honestly. "One of the Marines wanted to know why you stabbed one with a gun."

"I didn't know what else to do." Tori admitted, with a shrug. Curling up, she pulled her elbows up under her, where she propped for a moment. "I haven't fired one in so long… how was I supposed to know if it was ready to go? One thing I do recall about guns, Flint, is that there is no such thing as point and shoot. It has to be loaded, and there has to be one in the chamber, and it's got to have the safety turned off, and all that nonsense. I didn't think I had the time to figure it out first."

Flint laughed, shaking his head in bemusement. "Wow, Tori. Just… wow."

"Well, it worked, didn't it?" She defended, before pulling upright and tucking a boot under her other leg to balance there. Leaning forward, she spared a look at his person. "Gonna get that looked at?" She asked, indicating the slice through the armor on his side.

Flint looked down at it. "Maybe… it's not that deep, probably just a scratch."

"Heh." Tori scoffed. "You sat quietly on a pair of bulletholes for nearly nine hours, Flint, I doubt that very much." She waved a hand at the slice. "Take it off, let them look at you."

"If I sit down, I'll never – "

"That's not a bad thing, in your current condition." Tori interrupted, casting him a scrutinizing eye. "You've worn out the last of your stamina, and it's time to recoup. No more denial. If you don't get some rest, eat something, and take the time to let yourself _heal_, I swear I'll make it my personal mission to hit you in the head with the butt end of that rifle you like to carry around so much and _put_ your lights out."

Flint frowned at her, but he didn't protest. He knew she was right – it just didn't make him like it any more than before. She sat there and watched as he moved away, pulling more of the broken Mjolnir off as he went. When he reached the next gurney over, he made a heap of the stuff on it, eventually sitting down despite his protest about such an action. When the last of it was off, a medic ventured near.

Indeed, the cut through his armor had been deep, deep enough to breach the inch-thick metal plating. But the slice on his ribs was relatively shallow, and after it had been cleaned and stitched, the medics didn't even bother to bandage over the top. Flint sat still for the whole thing, seeming to contemplate the nature of the alloy the floor was made from.

Unable to offer pain killers, that was the last of that – although Tori did hear one of them advise he get a shower. It wasn't that Flint was especially dirty, but more likely because the water would do him good. It would also probably soothe some of the ache they could do nothing about chemically.

Trying to get up, he found it didn't take as much effort as it had at first seemed to, and once up, he shook his head; he felt too light, too springy. That confirmed the idea that his Mjolnir was falling apart. Getting the helmet from where the Marine had dropped it, he ejected Thor's chip, and dropped him into a pocket. When he turned to the doorway, though, Tori appeared at his side, startling him.

"Oh… hi there." He said, unsure how he ought to feel about being snuck up on.

Tori smiled and shook her head, hooking an arm around one of his. "Come on, I'll go with you."

"Go with me where?" he asked, as she steered him to the door and through it. "Was thinking about crashing, since there's nothing better to do."

"Finally got the last of the fight out of you, have I?" Tori teased. "Where do you expect we'll go from here?"

"Wherever Command sends me, I guess." Flint shrugged loosely. The motion set fire tingling in his bad shoulder, though, making him grimace.

Seeing that, Tori raised her eyebrows. "You okay?"

"It's nothing." Flint insisted. "… shoulder."

"What'd you do to your shoulder?" Tori asked.

"Punched a Longsword landing strut through it, some seven years ago." Flint answered. "Bothers me from time to time."

"Oh." She sounded as if she'd expected him to admit something more recent, but also content with that – it had been an honest answer, for once, and she wasn't about to rebuke that sort of thing.

Forgoing the shower for the moment in favor of collapsing instead, Flint laid down on his provided bunk and stared blankly at the ceiling until Tori waved a fist over his face, getting his attention.

Frowning at the fist, he asked, "What?"

"Get some sleep, don't make me hurt you." She threatened, a half-smirk on her features. "I'll do it, I will."

He grinned, then, understanding. "Oh."

* * *

Waking at the sound of a door chime, Tori blinked the sleep out of her eyes before looking around. At the other end of the room, she spied Flint – and the cat. She stifled a laugh, hopping up to quiet the door so as not to disturb him. Some time during their nap, Grace's tabby had found her way in, and had decided that the small of Flint's back was a good place to curl up and sleep. For his part, Flint looked draped over the cot more than laid upon it, but he was most definitely asleep.

Opening the door, though, she found herself facing no less than the _Nine Lives_ Captain himself. "Oh!" She backed up a step, surprised, before she remembered she ought to salute the man – she'd been too far gone into the backlogs of ONI's research and development for military doctrine to be a big issue for her anymore, but she only got half of the gesture out before he smiled and waved it down.

"Don't bother, that's not why I'm here." The man assured her.

"Um… okay." A moment later, she grimaced. "I mean, okay, sir."

He laughed. "I did say not to bother… I tried to look up your file, but there isn't one. After hearing what the doctors had to say, though, I can understand why. I also know why sir isn't exactly in your vocabulary anymore."

Tori's brow knit. "Uh…"

"I had a question, merely."

Her gaze dipped for a moment, to the embroidered name on his jacket. _Henderson_. Looking back at his face, she brightened her expression a little. "Okay, so ask me." She hesitated, then offered, "Sir."

The Captain smiled at her, obviously quite amused. "You're a Spartan. Where's your Mjolnir?"

She shook her head, quickly. "Oh, no, sir, no, no. I'm not the Mjolnir kind of Spartan."

He cocked his head. "There's more than one kind?"

"Well… yes…" Tori began feeling cornered. Casting a glance behind her, she made poking motions at Henderson's belly. "Let's continue this discussion in the hall… he doesn't often sleep, and I've no intention of waking him up."

Backing away from the prodding motions even before her suggestion, the Captain cast her a strange look. She was _odd_, no matter what she was. Spartan, ONI, even basic UNSC… she was _odd_. "Fair enough…"

Stepping out after him, she made sure the door had closed before turning back to face him. "Alright… why do you want to know where my nonexistent suit of armor is?"

He folded his arms over his chest, the motion seemingly contemplative. "His is… well, broken is too kind a word. I can send word to ONI's technical division to have new appropriated, and I wondered if I ought to have them fit you as well."

Her expression changed to mild surprise. "The Shaw-Fujikawa engines are back up?"

"Not as yet. I was told an hour… but the _Nine Lives_ is pretty badly beat. Not only that, she's got a dozen or so ticks sticking off her sides where they drilled holes in our hull with their boarding craft. I've got a course set in for as soon as we can jump, but we haven't moved yet." He cast a glance at the door. "Was that a cat I saw in there?"

Tori twisted her mouth off to one side. "Yes… sir… it is a cat."

"A real one?" He asked, looking back at her face.

She half wondered if it wasn't giving him a neckache, looking up at her like he was. "She's an original Earth-import, so I guess the answer would be yes, Captain."

Henderson nodded. "Wife adores the creatures. You never really realize what home really is until you start to miss the little things… dirt on the floor, cat hair in the cushions… anyway. Before I get distracted."

Tori half-smiled. "I suppose if I'm going to hang around him for very long at all, I'll be healthier for a suit, sir, if that's what you're asking." She admitted. "I'd have to spend some serious time in re-training, though, if he ever asked me to really use it, though."

"Knowing his creed… he just may." Henderson told her. "He's gonna want to go somewhere and do something, and he's gonna look over at you and think he's got some viable backup, and next thing you know, you're at his back and shooting at just as many targets as he is. Marines are the same way… so are the ODST crowd, for that matter."

Tori sighed. "I was just a _scientist_…"

"Oh well." The Captain shrugged. "I'll send down word… they'll bring a suit for you. HQ likes to think they keep their major assets well equipped."

"I don't really know if I should thank you or not, Captain." Tori admitted, sparing her scalp a speculative scratch. "Seeing as what this'll do… keep me alive, yes, but at what cost?"

"That of your previous livelihood, of course." Henderson told her. "Give the cat a pat on the head for me, will you?" With that said, he turned around and walked away, meeting another officer – a junior one by the looks of his bars – at the first juncture, and walking the rest of the way out of sight with him.

Tori sighed, feeling as if she'd just signed up to have everything changed.

At least she got to keep the cat.


	16. My First Mjolnir

**16: MY FIRST MJOLNIR**

It took a little more than the prescribed hour, but they made slipspace and escaped the spinning debris the Brute's ship had left after losing the fight. Spending four and a half days in slipspace and then another two out of it reaching for the planet where the drydock was hung in orbit gave the two Spartans enough time to heal, rest a little, and figure out the pattern Tori had never realized she needed; the booster shots had to happen at a minimum of eight hours apart, with a leeway of about forty five minutes, before it broke down and dissolved in her system, leaving her again defenseless to her environment.

Though that wasn't so terrible at Tori's end, she knew she'd get tired of the needles after a while. On the other end, however, was the problem that Flint was still a little green around the gills, and whatever he gave her had to be refined or its potency was reduced to mere minutes. This more or less boiled down to the necessity of giving a pint just to get a few ounces of clean blood out of the Flood soup.

But after re-rigging a dripline crossed through a small pressure valve, the Chief Medical officer managed to get the cleansing process a little closer to home. It left Flint feeling lightheaded more often than not, but the mess scraped out of him left more room for real blood to circulate. This would, in turn, allow for less filtering of what got drawn out, which meant more got to stay in.

Flint was still puzzled how it all worked, and what fool had tried the treatment the first time, but it did work, and it kept Tori functional and on her feet. The whole process was time intensive at first, too. By the time of their arrival at the dock, though, he needed less time at medical and so did she. Having managed somehow to get enough sleep to feel alive again over the short week, Flint thought he might have finally backed away from that proverbial edge.

The dark circles had gone from around his eyes, and some of the hollowness was gone from his cheeks as well. Without nearly so much spore count swimming around in his veins, he found it easier to keep a meal down, too, and as a net result, felt and looked overall much better.

What had started it, though, what had allowed him that return, he wasn't entirely sure. Maybe it was the cat… every night she made sure she got her place of honor on the small of his back, and if she couldn't sleep there for lack of access to the surface, she'd try to sit on his head until he couldn't take it anymore and buried it under the pillow – usually this meant he'd turned over, so she'd walk across his shoulders and curl up in her customary spot again.

Asking Tori about this only earned him a shrug; if she'd done it to Grace, it was a mystery, because Grace had never said anything about it, and the cat never slept with anyone else. Flint felt justifiably victimized… when confronting the cat, all he got was an arched back and a loud, buzzsaw purr. She had a random affection reticule in her head, though, and whoever she happened to decide she wanted to pet on her, she'd chase. This habit eventually got her showered on, though, when she followed a Marine into the head. After that she was a little more careful about chasing people into that particular room.

When she wasn't sleeping on Flint's back or chasing random crew members around the ship, she was a friendly enough cat, relentlessly begging and insisting for attention and affection, sometimes going so far as to meow loudly. She got opportunity to do that at the Captain once, while he was trying to talk to someone on the other end of a comn.

At the end of the second day of the second week, an ONI sloop dropped out of slipspace over the shipyard and cruised around to make dock. The man that came out of the sloop was dressed in a tech's casual jumpsuit, but the equipment he carried in the pouches on his gear belt looked far too refined for normal engine repair or maintenance. He found Flint on his own, deducting and reasoning that he'd be one of the Spartans in need of new equipment.

But when Tori turned up, scarless, too bright and springy to be a war veteran, and with hair down to her shoulders, he did a double take. She was taller than Flint by about an inch and a half, but that by itself did not make a Spartan. Finally, after looking over the rest of the crew, the man came up at a loss, and had to ask.

"Where's the other one?" He was standing in front of Flint when the moment came, both hands on pieces of new Mjolnir that he'd spread on a work table. Fitting such armor onto the trooper expected to use it was no small task – given that, just on a for-instance scale, John would have rattled around like a ping pong ball inside of armor meant for Flint to wear – and it was not especially quick.

Flint looked up, startled by the question. "What? What other one?" he bent slightly, to peer under the table. "Other one of what?"

The tech actually laughed. "No, no… I meant the other _Spartan_."

Straightening again, Flint made a silent "oh."

"I went looking, but I didn't see them anywhere."

"Tori is rather hard to miss." Flint mentioned, casting him a curious look. "I know I've seen the two of you in the same room at least twice so far."

"Which one is Tori?" The man insisted, sounding more flustered that he couldn't find what most people felt stuck out like a sore thumb.

"She's…" Flint looked around once at the interior of the weapons storage locker, and sighed. "Okay, so she's not particularly got any defining characteristics."

That made the tech heave a loud sigh. "Alright, then… how do I find this… generic Spartan?"

Flint smirked. "Taller than me, drinks too much chocolate milk…" his brow knit. "has too much hair to wear a Mjolnir helmet."

The tech's eyebrows rose. "_Her_? You're serious? I've fitted more Spartans than I remembered to keep count of, zero-nine-three, and I can assure you, _she_ does not say 'Spartan' to me. Not at _all_."

"She wouldn't." Flint told him, prying apart the interior of a gauntlet and trying it on his arm for the third time. "Stuff is stiffer than I remember."

"Different stuff, this time." The tech informed him. "Quit trying to bend it, it's not going to work."

Flint grumbled at him for that, but he plucked it off again and set it back down. "None of this is big enough."

"Yeah, I can see that. I guess I'll have to downgrade you."

Flint looked up sharply. "Downgrade me??"

The man waved a hand loosely at the assemblage of pieces on the table's surface. "This is Mjolnir Mark IIX, my friend. Don't think we haven't been making upgrades and changes to the suit design of your youth all this time. Don't worry… I have some old Mark VII back on the sloop. Maybe that will fit you."

Flint sighed, disappointed. New toys were always more fun than old ones… but he'd never worn VII, either, as the suit he'd utterly trashed the week prior had been VI. He'd get an upgrade… just not as much of one. Oh well. He watched as the tech departed, off to procure the promised Mjolnir, and almost as soon as he was out – and before the door had closed behind him – the entrance behind Flint slid open.

"Tori." He said, without turning.

"How do you always know it's me?" She asked, stepping up into his peripheral.

"A number of things, actually." He answered, turning his head to look squarely at her. "Why don't you try some of this on?"

"What is all of this?" Tori asked, looking dubious.

Flint picked up the gauntlet he'd almost broken earlier. "Mjolnir Mark IIX."

"Okay." She didn't sound impressed… in fact, she sounded more like the term had gone right over her head. Flint sighed, disappointed again. She would get better than him for sheer fact of being skinnier, and she couldn't even have the decency to gloat about it!

"Here, he brought the skinsuit." Flint said, putting the gauntlet down and reaching for the folds of stiff electrofiber fabric on the far corner from where she'd come to a stop.

She looked up, across at it. "Why's it called that?"

"Because it'll be your second skin." Flint said, deadpan. She was so hopeless.

"Something tells me that that's not going to be the highlight of this…"

He threw it at her, forcing her to catch it or let it hit the floor. "Yeah, yeah. Go put that on."

"I hope it has room for…" She paused, looked up at Flint, then cleared her throat, and finished, "… never mind."

He waved her out, so she turned and left again, skinsuit in hand. A moment later, he felt an impish grin spread across his face as he realized he had no idea which one that was… or if it would even fit her at all. She might come back out wearing a drooping bag! That would be a sight…

But lifting out the only other one he saw available on the table, he found it didn't look very small at all, so he figured he'd had a minor stab of good fortune and perhaps tossed her the right one. That, of course, depended entirely on the fortunes of the tech having expected a big or a small girl. Or, worse yet, a girl at all. He might have brought over equipment for Flint alone, given that he'd been unsure about Tori to begin with.

But when she came back in, it looked right. More to the point, it looked like she'd gone from a soft chocolate to a midnight black that looked like a derivative of blue. The skinsuit hugged all of her curves tightly, leaving no room for anything – air, wrinkles, imagination…

"Pinch anywhere?" Flint asked.

"It's a little snug across the front." Tori mentioned, rubbing her palms across her ribs in a sideways motion as if she were trying to settle the fabric in a different position against her skin. "But otherwise, it's okay. I do feel… somewhat naked, though."

Flint shrugged. "Looks fine to me." With that, he looked back down at the Mark IIX in front of him.

Stopping where she stood, Tori pouted and crossed her arms. He hadn't even taken his time looking – just a glance, and "it looks fine" was all she'd gotten out of him. Was he blind, dead, or drunk? He looked, sadly, none of the above. But it felt somewhat crushing to know she could receive such a cursory inspection while wearing such an outfit as she had on now and not even raise a single eyebrow for her trouble.

Maybe he just needed some prompting. Dropping her arms, she took the last couple of steps forward, pausing mid-step when he looked back over at her. "Tori, take those boots off."

That was the last straw. She shrieked in protest at him.

"The armor comes with its own boot, Tori." He assured her, evidently misinterpreting her frustration. "But they don't fit over standard issue combat boots. Take them off, I'll show you."

Huffing, Tori found a box crate and plopped down on it, crossing her legs to unlace the boots she'd carefully put back on. As she unlaced the second one, it occurred to her what the problem might be, as a conversation from the not-too-distant-past resurfaced;

_"Don't think I haven't noticed you sometimes go through the wrong quarter door at night."_

_Grace gave her a most scandalized look. "Tori!"_

_Tori laughed again. "Hey, don't look at me like that." She accused, scooping her short hair back and tying it into a one-inch-long ponytail. _

_"I thought you weren't supposed to notice things like that." Grace defended, her cheeks flushing as she poked her glasses upwards on her nose._

_"Why wouldn't I?" Tori countered, deactivating her data-pad. "You know the only reason the hormonal balance was disrupted was for accelerated growth; and you know they had to remove the platinum insert for inflammatory issues."_

Dropping the boot, she watched it hit the floor and tip over onto its side with a dejected sigh. Removed, yes. Hers, but only hers. Every other Spartan in existence retained theirs, and it had left her feeling every glance, every word like a series of inappropriately timed touches.

"Something wrong?"

Yes. "No." He'd never get it, not unless she went into boringly graphic scientific detail. Looking up, she saw he had a part of the glossy armor in his hands. It was so dark green it looked black whenever it wasn't under direct light, leaving the curve of light to shadow on the object a gradient from one color to the other. It was an interesting effect. "Which piece is that?"

He held it out to her. "Left glove."

He had to do most of her dressing due to her complete ignorance of the stuff, but she kept catching herself smiling whenever he wasn't looking despite herself. He sorted through quite a bit of the available pieces to get the sizes she needed assembled, but it all fit as if it had been designed around a flexible body type. The armor was slightly different from the older models of Mjolnir he'd worn in the past, with differing shapes of joint-locked plates over the various areas of the body. The gauntlets on her forearms proved to be in four separate but lock-linked pieces, rather than the mere two on the Mark IV and V. The chest was also different, with more of a V-pattern in the overall than a squared U.

The pauldrons were rounded off, rather than angular, and had an extra plate over the exterior, making it look thicker, more protective. The wrists were still free, as with traditional Mjolnir versus the SPI variant, but the armor crept closer to the joint in question, arching away again with the thickness as if to compensate for that. The latching lines that he saw once he was done fitting it around her melded neatly into the plating itself, and if he hadn't been the one to put it on her, he would never have figured out how to get it back off again.

Finally, he got the throat armor on her, and sealed it against her jawline. But once it was on, he paused with one hand on a helmet – she wasn't sure if it was the right helmet, as there were three sitting on the table – and frowned at her speculatively.

"What?" She asked, feeling wobbly. Maybe it was the armor's weight, or something similar. Whatever it was, she wasn't used to it. She was about to raise an arm to poke at one ear – both were covered by the jawline seal – and nearly lurched forward onto her face on the floor. Flint caught her, righting her.

"Hey, don't do that."

"What the hell!" She shrieked, right as the tech came back in towing another box crate. He froze in the doorway, seeing Tori clad up to her neck in Mjolnir Mark IIX.

"What the hell, indeed." He eventually said. Pushing the box crate inside, he stepped away from the door to let it auto-close. "You put her in that?" He asked, of Flint.

"Yes."

"You're _sure_ she's a Spartan, though?" He looked skeptical. Turning to Tori, he said, "Raise your arms."

"No, no." Tori issued, quickly. "The last time I tried to raise my arm, I nearly fell over!"

"You didn't break your arm?"

She paused, staring at him with both eyes as round as Flint had ever seen. He giggled. Trading the look to aim it at Flint, she demanded sharply, "What's so funny??"

"You are." He said, still grinning.

"What? Why? What's he mean by my breaking my arm??"

"Mjolnir's an accelerator suit. Your augmentations allow you to wear it without the processes shredding your skeletal structure… that's all."

"That's _all_??" Tori shrieked. "Shredding me?? I don't want to be pudding on the floor, Flint!"

"You're fine." He assured her, lifting a helmet and plopping it down over her protesting face. "Now hush up."

Tori shrieked anew when she felt the helmet grab and then yank her hair, promptly waving both arms wildly before managing to get them to stop waving and actually go where she wanted them to. The acceleration comment was not a lie, she knew, as every little twitch went like a slung punch. "_Oooowwww!!!_"

At that, even the tech couldn't help but smile, amused.

Flint looked at the spray of hair protruding out the back of the helmet, and hmmed. Turning to see the tech, he asked, "Do you have anything I can cut that mess with?"

"My hair is not a _mess_!" Tori protested, managing to fight the helmet back off her head. "And this one is too small! It plopped against the top of this cup over my chin and stopped."

Flint looked at her. "Okay. But you can't have that much hair and wear the armor, Tori. You'll need to cut it."

The look she gave him made him wonder if he'd somehow managed to ask her to squash the cat by mistake.

"What?"

"But… I _like_ my hair…"

The tech crossed his arms. "And you're _sure_ she's a Spartan…?"

* * *

Getting her from the worktable to the bay where they'd had their fight with the boarders – the majority of the birds in the bay had been taken out, leaving it quite spacious – was almost as hilarious as getting her dressed in the Mjolnir. The VII had fit, and it felt solid. It also felt good to be back in a good, sturdy suit of powered armor himself again. The lingering idea that it was a fragile, thin little veil of security nagged, but Flint didn't really care.

This one wasn't full of holes, and the shield emitter still worked. So too did all the aspects of the HUD, and just to see if it would, when he picked up a BR, the synch snapped to almost sooner than he expected it to. Satisfied with that, he put the rifle back, and moved on. Tori eventually got walking down, and quit wobbling around so badly. But turned loose in the empty bay to get used to it on her own, Flint got to watch her overextend in every single motion she made for a little while longer.

Even when she tried to poke her own visor, she wound up punching herself in the head. The resulting kickback from the motion set her staggering backwards, again overcompensated for the move. Flint could only stand there and chuckle helplessly, aware he hadn't seen anything so ridiculously funny in a long, long time.

Had he looked like that, when his first suit was new? He didn't recall.

Tori was not a slow learner, though, for all she was awkward at first. When she finally got it down, she did a slow pirouette, then tested her fingers, before turning and facing Flint fully. There, she waved at him.

He tapped two fingers on the bottom of his visor in reply.

Tori's head drew up and back, an almost classical accompanying motion to a puzzled facial expression. It took Flint a moment to realize why she'd done that – she didn't know what the gesture he'd sent at her meant.

That made him laugh, too. Finding her frequency, he clicked on the comn. Unless anyone listening had a radio also attuned to the same frequency, anything said between them would be entirely secret. "It's a smile."

"What is?" Tori asked.

He shook his head, grinning to himself. "This." He tapped his visor again.

Tori stood there silent for a while, then asked, "Why?"

"Because the visors stay polarized." Flint answered. "Can't see your mouth."

"Oh! Okay, I get it now." She sounded chipper enough, but the head-bobbing looked slightly exaggerated. Flint wondered if that didn't have more to do with the fact that she had a longer neck than some women than the fact that the armor was making her uncoordinated. "What else?"

"What else of what?" Flint countered. Here she was all out of sorts and he was finally comfortable again.

"What else does the armor do? I think I got the hang of being sped up and such. What else?" Tori asked. It almost sounded like she was a little too eager… but Flint was in a good mood, and he was feeling good for the first time in six months, so he humored her.

"This…" He slammed an open-handed punch into her front, center-of-mass, knocking her back several steps. But the impact had struck shielding, not armor, and the zero-point field sizzling bright white electric lines for Tori to look and marvel at was the whole point of the strike.

"What's that?" She asked, brightly.

"Your shields." Flint answered, demure. "You don't take the first volley of fire… it does."

"Cool!"

Ah, yes… there shown that overzealous little-kid-with-new-toy attitude. She'd gotten over having her hair shorn off her head – it was now as long as his stayed – and she'd finally gotten over the fact that she was still pretty uncoordinated, and now she wanted play with it, and find out how it worked and what all it did.

Jabbing herself in the visor, she asked, "What's this thing?"

Flint took a guess; "The HUD?"

"The what?"

"Head-Up-Display… shows you what's going on around you so you don't have to keep turning your head all the time. Also has ammunition count, weapon status, gear loadout, and such." He paused, to think. It had been so long since anyone had made him talk about the thing that he'd forgotten the words. It just _was_… he could read it easily, knew what every variation meant, knew when parts didn't work or when parts were overactive, and even knew how to recalibrate to fix those issues. But to rattle it off to a newbie? That was something he hadn't done in a long, long time.

In fact… the last time he could recall doing it, was when the whole lot of them were still stumbling around getting used to their own first suits. They had traded calls of what did what as they discovered it, though without quite as much enthusiasm as Tori was displaying.

Flint grinned at her, but he didn't sign it. Let her guess. Not that she really had to try – if she got him to talk at all, it'd be evident in his voice.

"Okay… the… circle." Tori ventured, taking her hand down.

"Motion tracker."

"The… bar… across the top."

"Power meter."

"It dipped when you hit me." She said, sounding a little more serious.

"For the shields… power to the suit in general only screams at you if you get hit where it'll hurt." Flint explained.

She nodded. "Ah. I guess that's a comfort, then…" She squared her shoulders, then, and promptly adopted a mock 'fight me' pose.

Flint shook his head. "You don't want me to do that." Feeling better, he'd only flatten her… and suffering the kind of enthusiasm she was at the moment, it'd only make her grumpy later on. Tori was not easy to live with when she was grumpy. She was almost as bad as the cat.

"Come on!" Tori insisted, laughing. "Come on, come get me! I feel like I can take on the world in this thing… lemme test it on something I'm not gonna hurt."

_Not gonna hurt_?? Well, if that was how she wanted to look at it… Flint unfolded his arms. At the conclusion of the motion, he saw her brace, so he set one foot out behind him, and as she made the last running step, he turned his good shoulder into her advance. When she struck, he felt the momentum carry upwards, threatening to topple him anyway, so he grappled her in a bear hug and brought her down with him.

They rolled once, flipping over at the conclusion as Flint brought a wayward arm into custody. Tori proved a slippery woman, though, when she spun around – not against – his grip and loosened it with the turn. Getting out from under him proved simpler than he thought he liked, when she got one long leg between them and kicked upwards. He turned over in mid-air, to land hard on his front on the floor. There, he tucked a shoulder before she could follow with a pounce, rolling clear of her reach and up onto his knees. From there, he stuck a foot to the floor and launched back at her.

That time, she caught him in the hug, but he muscled her into the floor again, one hand spread over her visor blocking much of her view out, with the other holding onto the wrist of an arm he'd managed to catch. Prying against herself, she was stuck wedged against the floor, but he'd forgotten to sit on those legs again, and one arched up and smacked him in the back of the head. His shields snapped in protest, their energy depleted to nearly half even as he lurched forward from the blow.

Knocked away, Tori tugged free out from under him, turned over, and came back to get him. Flint got one reaching hand slapped aside, but the next caught him over the visor much in the same way he'd done to her, only this time, she got lifted off the floor bodily when she tried to balance on his knees. Tossing her over his head, Flint took to a knee and jerked back upright, bringing a fist around to smack across the sudden presence of Tori right where he'd almost expected her to come back and be.

She was quick… and not because of the accelerated motions the suit afforded her. She had to choose to get up before the suit would quicken the motions, after all, and having the mental wit to know how to process information on the fly like that was a good sign.

Tori folded around his fist, rebounding from it back to the floor. Her feet went over her head, though, telling him she wasn't done yet. He took a single running step after her, the single stride all he needed to close the gap. Tori found herself coming up too close, right within grabbing range. She stuck both arms up in instinctual defense, but it only thwarted his initial attack by luck alone. Had he done _any_ of the other options such an opening provided, it would not have worked.

Bumped back yet again, Tori stuck a leg out behind her, braced on it, and came back. She pulled her arms back, then sent both forward in a double-fisted slug aimed straight for his throat. Flint ducked sideways, making her miss, but when he came around her to the side, catching a hold on the bars of metal arching over her shoulders, she threaded an elbow over his arm and socked him in the head with it.

Tori felt him drag her feet out from under her, though, keeping that grip on her armor even as his other hand came to cup the back of her helmet, and drove her down onto her face.

She twisted her hips around, kicking his own feet out from underneath him, and brought him down on top of her. Shoving against the floor for all she was worth, she somehow managed to trap him beneath her. Sticking a hand down past her own neck to get at him, she flipped around to face him.

Flint jerked when she bumped their helmets together, but she knew he knew it wasn't a head-bang attack. Resting a hand each on his shoulders, she lifted herself off of him, looking down at him. "I win!"

"No you don't." Flint protested. "I quit fighting."

"Why?" She taunted, adding a body-wiggle to the question.

He brought his arms up, and rested his hands on her elbows. "The armor is new, Tori, let me bask in that for a moment before I have to go and destroy it." He hesitated, then added, "This is my tenth suit."

"Your _tenth_?" Tori squealed. "My goodness! What happened to the other nine?"

"I destroyed them." Flint told her, bluntly.

"Like the one you just recently tossed in the can, I imagine?" Tori ventured.

"Very much so… some in worse, some in better condition than that one."

Lowering herself again to lay on top of him, Tori slid her hands back around his helmet. "You're just no good for the health of Mjolnir armor, that's all."

"Uh… Tori…?"

"Yes?"

"You're laying on me."

She giggled. "I already know that part."

"Um… why?"

"Why do I know?" Tori teased, knocking their helmets together again.

"No… why are you laying on me?"

"Maybe someday you'll figure it out, Flint." She assured him. "Someday."


	17. Epilogue: A Little SideMission

**EPILOGUE: A LITTLE SIDE-MISSION**

The report that the _Nine Lives_ carried not one but two Spartans came as a bit of a surprise to Command, and after the questions of how they'd come to be aboard had passed, orders percolated down as to what to do with them.

Flint found it of mild interest that Tori's new assignment was to be just what she'd been uncertain about – his backup. She suddenly had a rank again, rather than a title, although he had a feeling the title would be a long time in fading. Being a doctor of sciences for thirty years would not disappear overnight.

But it only took nine days to reach the world where the duo were to be dropped off. When Flint saw it first, he wasn't sure what it was supposed to be – but the ground chief assured him that that long, skinny star-dart thing was, in fact, the sloop granted by ONI for the more efficient shuttling of Spartans.

He walked around it on the outside once, just to see what it looked like, and found someone had mostly scoured off what had once been white lettering on the otherwise shiny black hull; it read _Whispers of Fate_.

Tori went and explored the whole of the interior first thing, but the cat found the copilot's seat and nested there right off. She would, Flint was sure, explore eventually. By the time Tori came back up to the front, Flint had gotten them off the ground, and was spooling up the slipspace drives as she sat down.

"You can fly anything, can't you?" She asked, picking up the cat and sitting down there.

"Most anything." Flint answered, half-distracted.

"Where did they say we were supposed to go, again?"

He cast her a look. "Manticore… you'll need to learn to remember these things, Tori, and you'll also need to learn to fly too. If something happens to me, you'll be lost and grounded if you don't."

Tori cast him a frown, but it was only evident because she'd taken her helmet off and set it somewhere elsewhere in the ship.

Flint studied the look for a moment, wondering where that somewhere was – he had not explored at all yet – before turning back to look at what he was doing. He'd gotten so far as somewhere besides the airlock, dropped the duffel that held everything he'd ever need along with the pants that still had Thor in a pocket in them somewhere, and then come straight to the fore of the craft, looking for the cockpit.

And finding it, he'd settled in.

"So what's it look like?" He asked, absently, nosing the craft through the breach in normal space and into the void beyond.

"Empty, very empty." Tori answered, stroking the cat with her gloved hands. The familiar buzzsaw purr interrupted Flint's next thought, so he cast the cat a look.

"Are we really going to keep her in here for the rest of forever?"

Tori looked back at him. "Yes, until we move back out again."

He sighed.

"She's a good cat."

"She's a menace." Flint complained, looking back away.

"She _likes_ you." Tori protested.

"If she likes me, why does she sit on my head and knead my ears until I roll over?" Flint argued. "I wouldn't call that liking me."

Tori smiled. "I would. She's a _cat_, Flint, she's a very simple creature."

He grumbled.

She eventually set the cat down, and after watching her wander around a little before going out the door and away down the hall to explore, ears up and whiskers fore, Tori turned back to Flint. Having done all he could possibly until it was time to come back out of slipspace, he reached up to unlatch the seal around his throat. He lifted the helmet free, and had just lowered it to one side and looked over at one of the screens when Tori jumped up, snatched it out of his hands, and ran hell for leather off down the hall.

"What – hey!" Flint protested, clawing out of his chair in a stumbling attempt at pursuit. Getting his feet under him at last, he charged after her, achingly aware that his previous nonchalance about the sloop's layout was now going to bite him in the ass – he paused at the head of the corridor, aware he had no idea where she'd gone off to.

Having heard him stop, Tori poked her arms back out into the hallway, waved the stolen helmet at him tauntingly, giggled, and disappeared again. Grumbling about everything that had ever bothered him, Flint trotted after her. She'd made the list, he was sure. Reaching the juncture she'd turned, he went down that way, a little unsure where he'd wind up before she decided to give up this stupid game.

Maybe he should just let her have it, and reclaim it later when she tired of his unwillingness to play. Catching a glimpse of her just ahead, he sped up, darting up to the next corner and hooking around it to nearly catch her. She shrieked when his fingers brushed her back, giggling as she fled around another corner more to evade than because she wanted to go that way.

"Aargh!" Flint complained, unable to catch her. She was just fast enough to stay out of arm's reach, especially using the ship's corridors to aid in her retreat. "_Tori_!!"

"You can't catch me! You can't catch me! Nyaa nyaa!" She called back, over her shoulder.

"You _watch_ me!" Flint shot back, a little irritated that she was getting so much fun out of this. He swiped at her again, but directly after, he overshot when she ducked suddenly through a door. Returning, he barged through it, aware as soon as he was through the door that he finally had her cornered – unless she somehow managed to duck around him and get back past and out into the hallways again. The room was a dead-end. It looked like a maintenance access chamber, several of the door panels with labels on them that read things like 'electrical fore' or 'weapons feed lines'.

Tori went right down the narrow chamber up to the backmost part, and turned around, still grinning her fool head off at him and waving his helmet in the air over her head like some prize she'd won. "Come on, come and get it." She teased.

Flint marched up the length of the room, still frowning. "If you're going to be like this the whole time we're out here…" He began, getting close enough to reach for the helmet. She twisted so it stayed out of his reach, just enough that his reaching fingers were only able to brush the exterior and unable to get a grasp on the object. After doing this twice or three times, Flint finally grabbed for the arm, intending to bring it down and into reach one way or another.

Instead of letting him have it, though, Tori tucked the helmet behind her head, dragging his own arm around back there with her own, and slung her other arm around his neck in a capture, and kissing him.

When she felt the grip around her wrist fall slack, she let him go, to witness that same blanked-out expression she'd gotten out of him the first time. She smiled, drawing the helmet out from behind her head and down to the side. His hand didn't really follow hers that time, but the pause wasn't satisfactory. Sliding her gloved fingers around the back of his head, she nosed his cheek once before kissing him again. That time, she felt reciprocation.

When she dropped the helmet, she knew it would stay there for a while.


End file.
